528th Digit

Nothing to hide?

2009-12-10T12:47:00.002Z

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

link (pdf)

Alternate link

Ideas Venn

2009-10-30T14:53:00.001Z

Control Senile Agitation

2008-09-09T22:03:00.000+01:00

Powershell - get modified files only (mofio) from subversion

2008-08-13T14:26:00.004+01:00

# Get modified files only
function mofio {
    param([string]$rev="HEAD")
    $url = ([xml](svn info --xml)).info.entry.url 
    $cmd = "svn diff -r $($rev):HEAD --summarize --xml"
    $files = (get-xpn ([string](Invoke-Expression $cmd))).select('/diff/paths/path[@item="added" or @item="modified"]')
    if (test-path "build") { rd build }
    $files | split-path | sort | uniq | foreach {mkdir "build\$_"}
    $files | foreach {
        $path = $url + "/" + $_.value
        $cmd = "svn export `"$path`" `"build/" + $_.value + "`""
        $cmd = $cmd.Replace('\','/')
        Invoke-Expression $cmd
    }
}

What's another word for...?

2008-04-25T11:29:00.011+01:00

This gadget is based on WordNet from Princeton University.

Behind the scenes it uses the new Google App Engine to store and query a database of more than 100,000 synonyms.

If it can't find any synonyms for a word it shows a link to Google search -

Try it out here...

Add it from Google's directory

Arrogance

2008-03-19T21:01:00.001Z

"Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."

- Sidney J. Harris

Texas Hold'em - Do you feel lucky?

2008-03-18T15:04:00.004Z

Would you go all in against 9 players if you were dealt AA?

Stemming from my current obsession with Texas Hold'em and having some free time while looking for work I've created a web service that returns the chance of winning a hand of Hold'em against 1-9 opponents.

The web service can be found here.

And then I wrapped the web service as a Google Gadget so it can sit on my iGoogle page.

It's not pretty, but it works. So now you can see that holding bullets (AA) against 9 opponents is not even a 1 in 3 chance to win. Don't do it donkey!

Not even four aces guarantees you will win...

Try it out -

You can use the +Google button to add it to your iGoogle page.

Chocolate Jesus

2008-02-28T18:36:00.001Z

Fantastic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wfamPW3Eaw

Sorry

2008-02-12T16:44:00.000Z

"We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry."

Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd

Other peoples misfortune

2008-01-31T15:06:00.001Z

A man goes to his doctor. The doctor says "I have some bad news for you, you're going to die."
- "How much time do I have left?"
- "Five"
- "Five what? years? months? weeks?"
- "Four.... Three..."

New Zealand

2008-01-30T16:20:00.000Z

1893: New Zealand is the first country in the world in which women gain the right to vote.

If you like Deicide and Cannibal Corpse...

2008-01-23T19:27:00.000Z

...then you might like this.

Severe Torture

And two of their videos.

Steve's trip to NZ

2008-01-22T13:55:00.000Z

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22739876@N05/sets/72157603700894726/

English is tough stough

2007-06-06T17:39:00.000+01:00

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!

-- Author Unknown

GDI+

2007-06-04T12:35:00.000+01:00

My conclusion after a week of debugging GDI+?

It is not well documented.

Mixins

2004-06-01T18:28:00.000+01:00

As far as I can tell, mixins are yet another artifact of the mistaken belief that modelling The Real World inevitably leads to better programming constructs.

The OO pioneers, struck by the apparent universality of abstraction and specialisation, and lured on by the taxonomical success of the biologists, had one key success, the creation of a powerful meme; the notion that object oriented methods must be pure in their conception, untainted by so called procedural thought.

This inevitably leads us to the current vogue; that to claim legitimacy, every new OO invention must have an appealing analogy in The Real World.

And mixins, by all accounts having their origin in an icecream store, and being as they are inherently an introduced novelty, are an indication of the extent to which the theorists are willing to embrace the farcical for the sake of conformance with the aforementioned meme of purity.

Mixins allow the would-be purist to program however they damn well please, all the while intoning the virtues of purity with a straight face.

Originally posted on Perlmonks.org

The fundamental cause of trouble

2004-04-25T22:55:00.000+01:00

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell in "Christian Ethics" from Marriage and Morals (1950)

Kernighan and Pike on problems with black-boxing

2004-04-13T22:57:00.000+01:00

"This is a pervasive and growing concern in software: as libraries, interfaces, and tools become more complicated, they become less understood and less controllable. When everything works, rich programming environments can be very productive, but when they fail, there is little recourse."

Kernighan & Pike, 1999, in The Practice of Programming

Smart or Pleasant?

2004-02-23T17:37:00.001Z

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" -- she always called me Elwood -- "In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant."

Well, for years I was smart.

I recommend pleasant.

And you may quote me.

Spoken by James Stewart as the character Elwood P. Dowd in the 1950 film "Harvey"

___

Mark Twain's Notebook (1902)

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.
- A comment on an unlined sheet of note paper in Twain's papers.

Misery

2004-02-08T17:41:00.000Z

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse, 1974

Unless you intend to kill him...

2003-09-10T17:40:00.000+01:00

Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps, especially not symbolically.

-- Robert A. Heinlein, Friday

Thoughts on Encapsulation

2003-04-20T22:59:00.000+01:00

"Encapsulation is the process of hiding all of the details of an object that do not contribute to its essential characteristics." [Booch 91, p. 45]

"Encapsulation (Information Hiding). A principle, used when developing an overall program structure, that each component of a program should encapsulate or hide a single design decision... The interface to each module is defined in such a way as to reveal as little as possible about its inner workings." [Coad 91, 1.1.2]

In this note I attempt to illustrate what I believe to be are two fundamental difficulties with the implementation of encapsulation.

Firstly, by encouraging the hiding of complexity, encapsulation does not provide for the inevitable imperfection of code that is produced under pressure. If an encapsulated object proves to be inadequate or defective then the situation is much worse for the maintenance programmer than if they had been exposed to the complexity all along. When this situation arises they must come to terms with unfamiliar code in addition to pinpointing and resolving the defect.

The second problem is that changing any moderately complex object risks inadvertently changing the bahaviour of that object, even if only slightly, and so it is often considered necessary to perform full regression testing.

If the development team has previously had bad experiences with "fixes making things worse" then this otherwise reasonable attitude can tend toward paranoia. And when the object is widely used, the cost of regression testing can be prohibitive, especially when a fixed deadline looms.

Some things that don't help:
1. Locally created (in house) objects don't always have the same guarantee that comes with commercial objects. Deadlines generally exert a negative pressure on quality control.

2. Feature creep. The initially simple and useful object is continually modified to add "just one more small but important feature" and with each new feature it increases in complexity until the day that it fails.

"At the heart of Object Oriented Programming lies the concept of encrapsulation, whereby the programmer gets to hide all the shitty details."

___
[Booch 91] Booch, Grady. Object-Oriented Design With Applications. Benjamin Cummings.

[Coad 91] Peter Coad and Edward Yourdon. Object-Oriented Analysis, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice Hall

Big-O notation

2003-04-18T17:45:00.000+01:00

First described by Kernighan & Pike (1999) in The Practice of Programming, p. 41. Addison-Wesley

Indicative of the duration and/or complexity of an algorithm relative to the amount of data being processed or traversed.

O(1) - algorithm always takes a constant amount of time.
O(log(n)) - algorithm duration is proportional to the logarithm of the dataset size. A binary search is O(log(n)).
O(n) - algorithm runtime scales linearly with dataset size. If it took 10 seconds with 200 elements, it will take 20 seconds with 400 elements. Scanning a list for an element with a particular value is O(n).
O(n*log(n)) - the best sorting algorithms (quicksort, mergesort) take this long to run.
O(n^2) - algorithm performance is proportional to the dataset size squared. Basic sorting algorithms (selection sort, insertion sort, bubble sort) take this long to run.
O(2^n) - only the slowest algorithms take this long to run. Traveling salesman problem, etc.

Thoughts on XML

2003-03-30T18:47:00.000+01:00

Data Volume

The bad news is that XML takes up a lot of space because every element is surrounded by a tag or attribute marker.
The good news is that XML can be highly compressed for storage and transmission.
The bad news is that it can only be highly compressed because it is so inefficiently encoded in the first place.
The bad news is that compression algorithms are an additional overhead.
(Interesting Design Goal in the XML Specification: "Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.")

Flexibility

The good news is that new elements of data can be added to XML hierarchies without breaking backward compatibility.
The bad news is that applications still need to be adjusted to deal with the new data, which brings you back to the original (main) problem of establishing an agreement between the two sides.

Human readable

The good news is that XML can be read and written by a human
The bad news is that XML processed by computers, not humans
The good news is that debugging is easier with XML (it is easier to inspect data in XML format)
The good news is that XML data can be formatted with white space to make it more legible
The bad news is that the handling of white space is an impossibly hairy problem, according to Tim Bray, co-creator of the XML specification.

Data Manipulation

The bad news is that XML hierarchies are necessarily based on a single view of data.

Fabian Pascal's view
(Paraphrased from an article found on Database Debunkings)
For data to be exchanged, all parties in the exchange must agree on a) what data is to be exchanged and b) what the data means. With this agreement in place, the tags that delimit the data elements have no intrinsic value to the parties involved - no more than other methods of delimiting data.
The agreement regarding content is orthogonal to the method and means of transfer - and XML performs worse in this area than most other data exchange formats due to the size inflation brought about by repeated tags and attributes.

Special Characters

Since XML uses the greater-than and less-than symbols as tag delimiters, it must encode these characters where they occur in element or attribute values. This encoding is the same as HTML.

Binary

XML can cope with binary, provided that the binary is encoded as ASCII (I write this with no intentional irony)

BOTTOM LINE?

XML is least suited to data manipulation within an application.
XML has a net disadvantage over other data exchange formats due to its bulk.
A significant benefit of utilising XML is that parsing technology is now ubiquitous - developers don't need to revinvent the wheel to cope with XML data.

Mysterious ORDER BY problem in SQL Server 2000

2003-02-17T17:43:00.000Z

Excerpt from an email sent to a colleague -

SQL Server performs the ORDER BY on the results obtained in the SELECT clause, not on the underlying tables. This does lead to some confusion (and as you demonstrate, to counter-intuitive results!) when you are combining several tables that share column names in addition to concatenating the columns themselves.

Note that in your example you are creating a new column called [StudentName] but never actually including the columns a1.surname or a1.forename in your results. I know it sounds pedantic to say that you are not including the columns, but it kind of makes sense if you think of your SELECT as creating a virtual table that is passed to the ORDER BY clause. The virtual table doesn't explicitly include a surname or forename column and so when SQL Server tries to resolve your reference to a1.surname, it obliquely ignores the 'a1' and seizes upon the surname column that you included as 'a6.surname'. I expect future versions of SQL Server will resolve this fuzzy behaviour.

To avoid this problem I recommend that you a) introduce the columns you want to order by into your select clause and b) try to be as explicit as you can, wherever you can, or specifically, try to use table aliases that give clues to what you expect (dont use a1, a4, a6 etc)

Surrogate versus Natural Primary Keys

2002-12-20T23:06:00.000Z

Q: Why should I use a surrogate primary key instead of a natural primary key such as surname + tax number?

A: Because if you choose a natural primary key you are making a commitment that the structure of each column will never significantly change - that it will never get longer or shorter, never be dropped, and never change format.

If your user requirements change - hence your columns change - your previously sound primary key may suddenly become unsound. It may become ridiculous.

Using a combination of columns as the primary key is also making a gratuitous commitment that these columns will forever continue to hold unique values.

Would you bet your life on this?

Forever?

It also obscures the purpose of the columns (is it user information or is it key?) and this will almost certainly make your life difficult later.

There's nothing stopping you adding uniqueness constraints to these columns.

So why make life difficult? Go with an introduced (surrogate) primary key.

SQL Server DB Owner problem and solution

2002-08-07T23:08:00.000+01:00

Sp_changedbowner will return message 'the proposed new database owner is already a user in the database' if the sysdatabases/sysusers mapping is out of sync and the sysusers dbo SID is already mapped to the login. All you need to do is execute sp_changedbowner twice, once to change ownership to a different login and again to change it to the desired user.

1. b4 - The Orangutan, Polish, Sokolsky opening

2002-02-27T23:10:00.000Z

Sick of being trounced by inferior players who happened to possess a superior knowledge of a particular opening, I search for an unconventional opening move (at least for white) and found it in the Orangutan.

White's first move is

1. b4!?

This is considered a dubious move by most experts because it does very little to establish a claim to the center, it doesn't directly help white prepare for castling, and it allows black to take the initiative.

But the benefits for the club level player are a strong bishop on b2, reasonable development albeit slightly delayed, and quickly getting out of "book" and into the mano a mano of the game.

There also quite a few players (particularly on FICS) who have played right into the obvious "trap" of this opening:

1. b4 e6 (black threatens Bxb4)
2. Bb2 (seemingly ignoring the threat?)
2. ... Bxb4? (falling for the trap)
3. Bxg7 (black now loses the Rook and probably the game)

Another trap is:
1. b4 e5
2. Bb2 Nc6? (black thinks this move protects his e5 pawn while simultaneously attacking whites b4 pawn)
3. b5 (chasing away the Knight)
3. ... Nd4? (black mistakenly tries to continue the attack on the pawn)
4. e3 (White develops, threatens and protects his pawn. The knight now just looks silly.)

Normal development by black is the safest bet.

Neal Stephenson on GUI

2002-02-06T17:13:00.000Z

By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books.

Extracted from command.txt, by Neal Stephenson

LTUAE

2001-02-22T09:23:00.000Z

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

Bertrand Russell in A Free Man's Worship

Apophasis and Paralepsis

2001-01-20T20:55:00.000Z

Mentioning something by saying you aren't going to mention it (e.g., "I won't mention his laziness") is called "apophasis" or "preterition". Joseph Shipley's Dictionary of World Literary Terms (The Writer, 3rd ed., 1970) says: "~apophasis~ Seeming to deny what is really affirmed. Feigning to pass by it while really stressing it" (e.g., "not to mention his laziness"): paralepsis. Touching on it casually: metastasis. Pretending to shield or conceal while really displaying (as Antony with Caesar's will in Shakespeare's play): parasiopesis. ... ~autoclesis~ (P. the self-inviter). Introduction of an idea by refusing before being requested, intending thus to awaken (and respond to) a demand, as Antony with the will in Julius Caesar." "Paralepsis" is more often spelled "paraleipsis" (which is the Greek form) or "paralipsis". A few sources (such as The Century Dictionary, and the Universal English Dictionary by Henry Cecil Wyld) do not support a distinction between apophasis and paraleipsis.

Wipe a hard disk

1999-04-01T21:48:00.000+01:00

Boot to Win98SE startup disk
debug
-------------------------------------------
-F 220 L1000 0
-A CS: 100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80 <---"80" for hd1, "81" for hd2 >
xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110
-G
Program terminated normally
(reboot)
-------------------------------------------
Now you have to f-disk and format and reinstall the operating system.

Beautiful Nature?

1998-08-11T20:48:00.000+01:00

I do not understand where the 'beauty' and 'harmony' of nature are supposed to be found. Throughout the animal kingdom, animals ruthlessly prey upon each other. Most of them are either cruelly killed by other animals or slowly die of hunger. For my part, I am unable to see any very great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm. Let it not be said that this creature is sent as a punishment for our sins, for it is more prevalent among animals than among humans.I suppose what is meant by this 'beauty' and 'harmony' are such things as the beauty of the starry heavens. But one should remember that the stars every now and again explode and reduce everything in their neighborhood to a vague mist.

- Bertrand Russell (W.A.)

JCL - Job Control Language

1996-02-27T21:34:00.000+01:00

Created in the 1960's by IBM to handle running Jobs on a mainframe.

JCL is very strict with regard to formatting, for example every line must begin with // (two forward slashes) and comments must be placed after column 72.

Example:


//JOBNAME  JOB  CLASS=Z,MSGLEVEL=(1,1),REGION=256K
//STEP1    EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSUT1   DD  DISP=SHR,DSN=SYS1.PROCLIB(INIT)
//SYSUT2   DD  DISP=OLD,DSN=DASD1.RANDOM.FILE
//SYSPRINT DD  SYSOUT=A
//SYSIN    DD  DUMMY
//

The Ideal Development Team

1995-07-06T21:34:00.000+02:00

Notes and summary of ideas taken from the book “The mythical man-month” by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., 1982.

This book presents a model of an ideal software development team. The proposed model requires an extremely talented programmer who is “the boss”, and a set of support staff who are each expert in their own domain. The central idea is to establish and support a heirarchy that capitalises on the strengths of individuals. The book specifically targets software development but its ideas could be applied to any technical system development where domain experts exist.

Assumptions

Good programmers may outperform average or poor programmers by a ratio of 10:1.
Large teams of programmers (ie more than 10) are inherently inefficient.
Small teams of good programmers are too slow for really big systems.
Good programmers should program, not manage.

The 10 team members of an ideal team:

1. The surgeon defines the problem, designs the program, codes, tests and documents. This person must be talented, have 10+ years experience and considerable systems and applications knowledge.

2. The copilot is the alter ego of the surgeon, but is less experienced. This person is not responsible for any code, but serves as a sounding board, evaluator, insurance against disaster and an interface to other teams and projects.

3. The administrator is the interface to the bureaucracy of the rest of the organisation, and serves to remove all administrative tasks from the surgeon, who remains in charge at all times. The administrator may serve more than one project or team.

4. The editor is responsible for producing clear documentation. This person may take the raw documentation produced by the surgeon and revise it for clarity.

5 & 6. Two secretaries, one for the administrator and one for the editor.

7. The program clerk is trained in secretarial methods and is responsible for the systematic maintenance of the developing system. This person ensures that all project output is filed properly and made available to the entire team, including both machine-readable and human-readable files.

8. The toolsmith is an expert who is responsible for providing and maintaining the development tools that the surgeon uses..

9. The tester is in an adversarial position relative to the surgeon, and designs banks of test data from the system specifications. This person is responsible for devising day to day test data, and also for the creation of a test harness required for component tests.

10. The language lawyer is an encyclopaedic reference for the surgeon and may also be responsible for difficult, obscure or tricky aspects of the system. This person may serve more than one project or team.

Key differences between the surgical approach and the conventional divide-and-conquer approach:

A surgically created system is the product of one mind, or at most two, helping to ensuring conceptual integrity.
The team is naturally efficient through functional specialisation and a simplified communication pattern.
Internal differences of interest and opinion are eliminated in the surgical team where the surgeon is the unilateral decision maker.

A team like this is mostly suited to small to medium projects. To scale up to very large projects, the team must be duplicated as many times as necessary, and the project must have one overall architect who will design the entire system.

This approach is opposed to the ideas of multi-skilling and democratic decision making - the surgeon is king of the castle and depends on the support of functional experts in order to fulfil the role of a controlling brain.

The experiences recounted in this book are largely derived from the System/360 project, which was to build a mainframe operating system.

In Praise of Idleness

1970-01-01T21:22:00.000+01:00

By Bertrand Russell

1932

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the bread out of other people's mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less obvious, and different cases arise.

One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.

From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917 1, and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened, and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist.

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming, as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.

I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what were called the 'honest poor'. Industry, sobriety, willingness to work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name, Dialectical Materialism.

The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.

For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country, full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?

In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.

In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: 'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.

The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.