Month: January 2016

Clarke’s Third Law – Challenge, or Fate?

borg

Arthur C. Clarke’s third law is:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Last Thursday I attended a lecture entitled “Our Children, Our Technology, Our Future”, which was an excellent talk given by Dr. Stephen Sagarin (read his blog “What is Education?” here), discussing the questions:

  1. Given what we know about the development of children, how can we imagine a healthful future with technology?
  2. What characterizes technology as a human creation, and what ethical and educational demands does it require?

It occurred to me that as technology, and the computing devices that operate the technology, becomes more and more advanced, a corallary to Clarke’s third law would be:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a human being.

That is, after all, where technology is heading, and has been since Alan Turin, in 1950, developed the Turing Test – a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

In fact, our machines are being designed to be “better than human”.  Or rephrased, our machines “are beings” designed to be “better than human.”

Rather than accepting this fate, of not just indistinguishable but actually better, the challenge that we, as human beings need to take up, is:

How do we continue to advance ourselves so that human beings continue to be distinguishable from the machine?

And not just by our predilection to violence!

The Three Criminal Aspects of OOP

police

As a software developer, you’ve undoubtedly been asked by a recruiter, who’s following some script: “what are the three major aspects of Object Oriented Programming?”

And you probably answered something like this:

  • Polymorphism, basically something taking more than one form as you need it. For instance method overloading in C++.
  • Inheritance, in C++ the ability to gain functionality of a parent class in a new child class without having to write that functionality yourself.
  • Encapsulation, the idea behind creating self-contained reusable code that’s hopefully loosely coupled with single points of reference to allow you swap in and out objects as needed or use someone else’s work without knowing the inner workings of an object.

Next time you’re asked a basic question that a) everyone knows, b) anyone can google, answer it this way:

  • Infraction — You’re foot has two operations: push hard, and push harder, on the gas.
  • Misdemeanor — Your child looks like you, their parent, and uses your ID card to buy beer.
  • Felony — The key that unlocks your 1960 VW also unlocks the neighbor’s Porsche.

See what the recruiter thinks of those answers!

Invalid Index Exception trying to load Counter Name

perfctr

 

 

This happened to me yesterday, and of course, Stack Overflow to the rescue.  But it’s such a rare occurrence that I thought I would blog about it.  Here’s the SO link

The offending line of code, which was working perfectly for months until yesterday:

cpuCounter = new PerformanceCounter("Processor", "% Processor Time", "_Total", true);

And I hope that “tdc” doesn’t mind me reposting his answer here:

Although this has already been answered, I see people are repeatedly getting the same error that I did when trying to solve it. If when you run:

C:\windows\system32> lodctr /r

you get the error

Error: Unable to rebuild performance counter setting from system backup store, error code is 2

then you instead need to run

C:\windows\SysWOW64> lodctr /r

after which you should get

Info: Successfully rebuilt performance counter setting from system backup store

 

Can I Sue Pearson for their bogus “Workplace Personality Inventory” results?

gavel
Yesterday I took a “Workplace Personality Inventory” test, apparently put together by Pearson (no, I didn’t pay for it).  I was rather shocked by the results:

  • I am “unlikely to set challenging work goals, and may exert a low level of effort toward achievement of goals”
  • I “may not persist when faced with difficulties or obstacles, or when success seems unlikely”
  • I “have little interest in volunteering for or taking on new work responsibilities or challenges”
  • I “Appear to have little or no interest in taking charge, or directing and leading others; may be hesitant to offer opinions”

So, being a Microsoft MVP for 5 years, a Code Project MVP for, what 13 now, having written (voluntarily, on my own time) over 180 articles, being a consultant for every 20 years, run multiple open source projects, having solved problems that PhD people were unable to solve, etc, etc, etc, and it analyzes my answers into “I’m a lazy, unmotivated, uninterested in challenges, and have no interest in leadership?”

Has anyone else encountered this bullshit?  If so, tell me your story.  I seriously want to sue these people.