I got bitten by this yesterday when I updated. I didn't expect it at all and only realized I had installed something a fraction of a second after I clicked what looked like a Next button... Went to Control Panel and uninstalled as soon as I noticed an icon in the taskbar notification area.
This is one of the things that most baffles me about alcohol culture in general, but specially in the American tech industry which is supposed to have smart people. Although my primary reason for abstaining from alcohol is a religious one, I also certainly agree with your point from a secular point of view as well.
As an aside, why is alcohol such a big part of things like tech meetups, etc? I've been to a few and there is always alcohol being served and people drinking it. As a Muslim, I've never touched alcohol and never will, and I don't understand the need to "alcoholize" everything. Why can't there be a culture of having just good clean fun, no alcohol, no drugs, no sexualizing? And what place does alcohol even have at tech events?
There's a long history of alcohol being used as a 'social lubricant' in European cultures. It reduces inhibitions, initially to a point where everyone's having a better time than if they were stone cold sober, but with increased consumption, to a point where Bad Things™ are almost guaranteed to happen.
As a fellow fan of 'good clean fun' but as someone who can also tolerate a pint, I totally see your point and think good clean fun is more appropriate for professionally-aligned events.
The thing is, there are levels of drinking. There's having a few beers in a group to get the laughs rolling (which is still reasonably clean fun and many non-drinkers are OK in this environment).. and then there's the raunchy American style "party" drinking (i.e. doing lots of shots, beer pong, getting drunk as fast as possible). Non-drinkers will not fit into that sort of environment at all.
The drinking in the story here sounds more like the latter and IMHO is rarely appropriate, especially at a professionally-aligned event.
As a non-believer, I've never touched a sacred book and never will, and I don't understand the need to "indoctrinate" everything. Why can't there be a culture of having just good clean fun, no religion, no wars, no oppression in the name of a virtual god?
(point being: blame the perpetrator, not the substance)
Religion and alcohol are not the same. Are trying to say that religion is like a rapist? But even if I continue with your horribly broken and anti-religionist analogy, I could say: I don't bring religion into my work/meetings so why bring alcohol into it?
Because, as a Muslim, I assume he doesn't drink. He was asking a fairly legitimate question, which is why is alcohol so closely associated with the tech scene?
My answer to him is that alcohol often helps folks loosen up. It's great, and fun, but only when you take it in reasonable moderation.
Alcohol is a big part of many social gatherings. However in tech especially this is more common because of the typical founding story of many startups.
Most startups are founded by 2-3 men who are usually close friends both professionally and personally. This means that they probably have a history of working together, coding together, eating together and drinking together. Since professionalism in our career is based largely on what you consistently deliver and this is directly and unambiguously observable, indirect proxies for professionalism like dressing in a suit and tie or abstaining from alcohol are not paid lip service. It's this very uncommon, but perfectly rational definition of professionalism that makes our career more accessible to people based on their skills and less dependent on their social class, social skills and social network. Yes, those three things matter, but they matter a lot less in tech than in other industries.
With that in mind, we don't automatically put drinking alcohol while producing our work product in the list of things that are taboo and unprofessional. These norms stick with a company as they add on new employees, including eventually women in the case of startups founded by men.
If you've never been on the founding side of the equation, then its easy to be dismissive of these norms within a company when you join as a latecomer. From the perspective of the founders, there is an element of a faustian bargain in growing your company. On one hand you are succeeding, but on the other hand you end up having to forfeit people for processes and forfeit much of your company culture for a small subset of your cultural norms. It starts feeling less like a family and more like a bunch of people who cooperate for their financial well being. It's perfectly natural for those in tech companies early on to lament the loss of many aspects of fun as a company matures.
Just as the founders doing the recruiting need to be sensitive to the needs and expectations of new recruits, people joining later need to be sensitive to the fact that the founders and early employees are giving up things they hold dear to them to accommodate the needs of later hires.
In moderation, alcohol allows people to loosen up and enjoy themselves more in social situations. Since one of the primary purposes of conferences is networking, and thus socialising, a lot of people enjoy drinking at them. The problem here is the culture of drinking to excess, not the availability of alcohol alone.
Islam forbids alcoholic drinks which is why most Muslims, including myself, do not consume them. I mentioned that I am Muslim by way of explanation as to why I don't drink, so it actually has everything to do with this.
Let me tell you my own personal story. Take from it what you will.
My first passion in computers was programming. Before any games (other than Microsoft Flight Simulator), it was programming. I started when I was 8, in QBASIC. By the time I was 14, I was hacking away at 3d graphics, physics sims, my own OS kernel, etc. That was also the age at which I completed my highschool, as I was homeschooled after 5th grade.
It was at this point that my parents wanted me to go to college, but I didn't want to. We fought over the issue a lot. I ended up going and dropping out of 3 or 4 different universities. My longest stay was around 3 years' living away from home on campus. That was my first time really being out in the world by myself. I learned a lot, made friends, played video games seriously for the first time. I failed or barely passed most of my courses (even the computer science ones), withdrew from a lot of quarters (they didn't have a semester system). But when I participated in coding competitions I felt the most alive I had ever been and I usually won them. During all this time I had the dream of starting my own company, something which I had known since before I had graduated highschool.
That's how my teens years passed. I was a very ambitious, headstrong, rebellious, and emotional teenager and early-20s guy. I dealt with depression and some probably bipolar-like symptoms. All this combined into a cycle where my parents kept pushing me to go to college and complete it, and I would relent and accept, but I wasn't able to go through with it. Around the time I was 18 I started to look for work online, and I found an online project from a small company. I ended up entering into a long-time remote working relationship with them, doing projects here and there. I was getting some income (but not much).
When I was around 22 I was back at community college as otherwise my parents would have kicked me out. I was a bit more emotionally stable now, so I was able stick my classes, but overall, I very, very much disliked the college experience. It was here, at community college, that I met a guy who told me about the hot iPhone app market. I started hanging out with him and I started coding on his laptop (he didn't know any technical stuff). Eventually I ended up building my first app in Xcode. I decided to partner up with him and form a company. My own company! I thought. This is the dream coming true! But I had no experience in setting up a business, and the only reason I partnered up with this person was because I was very excited. No rational thought went into it. We started off slow, then it just took off. At one point we had more than one app in the top 25 of our category, and even one in the top 5! We were so excited and the money was just rolling in. But that's when the internal problems came to a head. The more money we made the more problems. He wasn't pulling his weight, I was doing all the work, he was acting the "boss" etc etc. Eventually we broke up, I left. The app plummeted in ranking as our quality of work suffered and the updates stopped coming. At one point, I had spent 2 months sleeping nights at the office and coding in the day because of the pressure from my business partner on me to "work". It took a huge toll on me mentally. I finally realized he was just using me and decided to break away. But I wasn't up to the task of fighting him for the company, I just wanted to make a clean break ASAP because of my mental state. Well, I did it. It was such a relief. I put it behind me and continued on. I went back to working remotely with that small company I used to do projects for before. For about a year that kept me going.
Which brings this story to the present. Now I'm 26 years old. That small company wasn't able to keep paying me, so I searched for 2 months for a job. I got one recently. The pay is decent, flexible hours, have to work at the office though, nothing too exciting, but I'm satisfied. I have some stability in my life. I was going to a university again. I had decided not to pursue computer science as a major again, instead going for physics or mathematics. But I quit that once again so I can do this job. Now, on the side, I have a startup project going again, with another person I worked with at my previous startup. We're taking things slow (a little slow right now), but it's nothing I can't manage working the weekends. I still have that dream and that passion. In fact, I have many dreams, the smallest of which is to have a successful tech company. But my now 26 year old brain is a bit more emotionally mature. I have some practical real world experience behind me. No matter what anyone says, that real world experience is invaluable. I have decided not get my degree after all. What would have happened had I stuck to the "normal" path, and not fought my parents over going to college? I would probably have had a degree at 18, and with my skills a really good job at a big tech firm lined up when I graduated. In eight years I would have been making at least 4x what my current (first real) job is giving me. I might even have been married with kids. But that wouldn't have been ME. This is me. This is the path I have made for myself, and I honestly regret nothing. I will keep trying. At 26 years old I feel kind of old. How old will I be when my company is successful? 28? 30? 40? I don't know... that's kind of disappointing, but I'm gonna keep at it.
I think many here will tell me - I should still go back and get a degree. But I've made my decision and I'll live with it. And my life also doesn't revolve entirely around me being a hacker or having my own startup or wanting to be the next Instagram or what have you. I have many passions around which I base my identity. If my next startup fails, I won't lose myself in the process. And I'll still be financially stable with a regular job. Keep that mind as you forge your own path in life. Don't focus everything you have on one little thing. Give yourself something to fall back on financially. And have your sense of self rooted deeply AND widely - so that a failure in any one part doesn't make you personally feel like a complete failure. I came close to that in my first startup. And I can't imagine what I would have been like mentally had I not had other passions in which I could still feel successful. Well, I guess now I'm lecturing you and I kind of promised not to do that in my first sentence... But I'm not telling what to do. Take whatever path you want, but I think you should keep these things in mind.
Thank you for sharing. In my eyes, you have already succeeded. In my eyes, you succeeded right when you stopped drinking the Kool-Aid. You are doing what you love to do. Consequently, all work you produce is great work. I have nothing but admiration and respect for your decision to forge your dream.
I'm a religious American Muslim who fasts every day of Ramadan every year. So, what you're saying is that if I am Muslim, it's Ramadan, I'm fasting, and I'm traveling for religious purposes - that's suspicious? What your religion or ethnicity is, or how religious you are, or what your specific religious practices are - none of these should even be a factor to consider in security to the TSA/police/FBI/etc. I find this view to be utterly disgusting.
Muslims calling Ramadan "a fasting month" is a serious devaluation of the word "fasting". It's not actual fasting if you only eat at night. It's fasting if you don't eat for at least full day. Say, eating once or twice only every other day.
Also, doing this for one month in a year is another sham. How very useful!
Dear gngeal,
I represent "the Muslims", yes all 1.6 billion of them. Upon receiving your comment we immediately held an emergency meeting (because we care) and decided to apologize for carrying out this sham for the last 14 centuries. What would you have us call it instead? I'm sure it'll make a huge difference.
I think it's well known among Muslims that there are multiple readings of the Quran. Another point of note is that unlike the Christian or Hebrew writings, the main method of preservation of the Quran has been through mass oral memorization, and so Muslims tend not to place much emphasis on manuscripts. All the printed editions of the Quran (known as Mushafs) are, in fact, authenticated by well-known memorizers of the Quran (Hafizs). It's also notable that while Bible literally means book, Quran literally means Recital, indicative of the fact that is in rhyming prose and meant to be recited orally from memory rather than read like a book.
this is not accurate. OP is referring to multiple _writings_ of the Quran, which is in fact something you'd be flogged for suggesting in most Muslim countries. The accepted dogma is that the words of the Quran have been protected from changes despite its oral nature, thus making the message more pure than that of the texts before it. also important to note is that translated versions of the Quran are not approved for worship - everyone must use the native Arabic. this does help ensure continuity in words if not meaning.
I am aware of the variations in ancient manuscripts of parts of the Quran. These variations are due to different scripts, different recitations, and sometimes scribe error. There is no reason why I would be flogged if some ancient manuscripts do not conform to the Quran. The accepted dogma is that the Quran has been preserved because of its oral nature, not despite it. No manuscript is as authentic as the oral word, and of course, no translation, whether oral or written, is the Quran itself.
And it isn't coincidence that stuff tends to spin the same way. Because when you don't then tidal forces try to pull you back into alignment. Of course, being basically frictionless tops, the main effect is that the rotation precesses. (The Earth's rotation takes about 26,000 years to precess.) However there is a tiny tidal friction component that slowly tends to bring things into alignment, and which is trying to lock all spins to each other.
And the operative word here is "slowly". If the Moon had been thrown off, spinning the opposite way from the Earth, it would have remerged. Instead the Earth's rotation is being transferred into throwing the Moon into a higher orbit at about 4 cm/year. (For comparison, this is a bit under twice the rate that the North American Plate is moving.)
The main consequence here on Earth is that the UTC system that we all use is going to have to add leap seconds more and more often over time, and in a few thousand years either we'll need to reconsider either the length of the second, or our tying the measurement of time to astronomy. (My vote would be to remove the astronomical definition. Humans seem to be OK living with time zones that do not match the sky. Having to move those time zones every few centuries does not seem like that big a deal. There won't be an observable issue in a normal human lifespan from this until after longer than human civilization has existed so far.
Astronomers are in charge of UTC right now, and they would hate the change. But when you consider how much it would cost astronomy to cope compared with the real costs of software bugs that tend show up when they insert leap seconds in UTC, right now the tail is very much wagging the dog.
This one is done - the definition of the second is not based on astronomical observations.
"Since 1967, the second has been defined to be:
the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom"
The accuracy of this kind of measurement is so high it's also used (along with the speed of light) as the basis for defining the meter. Earth-time is a complicated and messy business but the base unit, the second, is pretty much nailed down and independent.
I was stating logical possibilities, not feasible ones.
You are right in how we define the second. It was chosen so that on average the number of seconds from midnight to midnight is 606024 = 86,400. At this point a ton of stuff depends on it - the only change that I think likely is to something that we can measure even more precisely than the current standard.
But we have set up UTC such that the first second of every year starts close to midnight for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, London. This sometimes requires having minutes with 59 or 61 seconds (usually 61).
These weird minutes have real costs. For instance the June 30, 2012 leap second crashed Linux machines around the world, taking down quite a few websites. And the costs are only projected to increase as we have more programs that make assumptions about UTC, and the slowing day requires more leap seconds to be added.
Therefore logically we have 3 choices. Change the meaning of a second (not feasible), continue putting up with leap seconds (costly, and serves no purpose unless you're an astronomer), or give up the UTC peg to an astronomical fact. Unfortunately astronomers control UTC right now, don't want to give it up, and don't care how much their leap seconds cost everyone else. But this can't last forever.
Given the way that things work, I don't think that it will change until there is some disaster that is too big to ignore. For instance a leap second bug causes some critical control software to fail, leading to a industrial accident, which brings the attention of politicians and the general public to this ridiculous situations. (Or crashes critical aviation software. Or something else on that scale.)
If the current situation maintains, it is just a question of time until something on that scale happens. But until that happens, I don't think that astronomers will understand the costs that they are imposing on the rest of the world.
My thinking is that since it is obvious that we'll lose the astronomical peg eventually, we should lose it now. Before someone dies.
This is a genuine question - do you really believe the (to me, seemingly obvious and much greater and potentially more dangerous) costs of switching away from astronomical time for measuring something inherently astronomical like the length of a year are smaller than the costs of removing the occasional time-handling bug in software?
Even in your example, Linux machines didn't actually crash - some processes spinlocked. And it wasn't even all Linux machines, if you were running a mildly old kernel (say, the one that came with debian etch and derivatives) nothing happened whatsoever.
Beyond that, there is no shortage of time standards that are both based on SI seconds and free of leap seconds - Terrestrial Time, International Atomic Time, GPS Time come to mind -
Equally genuine counter: what costs do you see associated with redefining a year as e.g. a fixed number of seconds? To me none are obvious, surely they'd be small compared to what we've already lost from these software bugs.
Leap smear is a good solution, as is TA1; sadly the posix/unix standards do not permit it (which makes it difficult to use on e.g. government projects).
Well, for one thing a non-constant second seems like it would break just about all of physics in deeply unpleasant ways.
I think 'btilly is right - it's an unpleasantly difficult problem.
I suppose my point is 'it just happens to be unpleasantly hard problem' - given that a great number of specialists have put serious time in thinking about it trying to solve it, I have a very difficult time imagining that the solution (or satisfactory answer) is as simple as 'just blame astronomers'.
Having _two_ or more slightly different units that measure the base unit of time (which would be the case if we defined seconds in terms of (siderial? some other?)) year seems like a far greater potential source of cock-ups than just having a well-defined unit that might not quite, but more often than not, matches astronomical detail.
>I suppose my point is 'it just happens to be unpleasantly hard problem' - given that a great number of specialists have put serious time in thinking about it trying to solve it, I have a very difficult time imagining that the solution (or satisfactory answer) is as simple as 'just blame astronomers'.
As far as I can tell the proposal before the ITU (replace leap seconds with leap hours, with a view to abolishing leap hours once any incompatibilities with national laws have been resolved) solves all the problems quite nicely. I'm not entirely clear why they voted to defer a decision until 2015, but I'm not aware of any serious objections to the proposal.
I'm not aware of any serious objections to the proposal.
The only objections that I've ever heard about are astronomers who are annoyed that this piece of traditional authority is being taken from them. My obviously unsympathetic attitude is that they used to serve an important role, but their once critical role in precision timekeeping has been obsolete since the development of the atomic clock. It is time to recognize that.
This is a genuine question - do you really believe the (to me, seemingly obvious and much greater and potentially more dangerous) costs of switching away from astronomical time for measuring something inherently astronomical like the length of a year are smaller than the costs of removing the occasional time-handling bug in software?
Absolutely.
As http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1967009 notes, fear of encountering leap second bugs ALREADY causes many factories to schedule downtime around leap seconds because of how serious the potential consequences of not doing so could be. It is just a question of time until someone who had such a bug doesn't realize it, doesn't schedule downtime, and suffers the consequences.
And what's the consequence of eliminating leap seconds? In the next few decades the Earth and our clocks will drift out of alignment by about 1% of the amount that they are already forced to be out of alignment for most of us by the fact that time zones are an hour wide. Which very few people will notice.
Even in your example, Linux machines didn't actually crash - some processes spinlocked. And it wasn't even all Linux machines, if you were running a mildly old kernel (say, the one that came with debian etch and derivatives) nothing happened whatsoever.
If the bug had been introduced during a longer period without leap seconds - not long ago there was one that lasted 7 years - then its impact would have been more widely felt. And it is true that it wasn't technically a crash, but many websites did suffer outages because internal services stopped responding. In common usage that was a crash.
Beyond that, there is no shortage of time standards that are both based on SI seconds and free of leap seconds - Terrestrial Time, International Atomic Time, GPS Time come to mind...
UTC is the standard for time in C, all languages derived from C (eg Java), and all languages written in C (eg Perl, Python, PHP, etc). It is also the standard in all Unix operating systems (including OS X), POSIX, Linux in all variations including Android, and has even been adopted by Microsoft. It is also the standard in widely used protocols written on top of that, like HTTP, and inside of any software built on top of them, such as web browsers.
Yes, there are other definitions of time that you can use. But UTC as published by NIST and distributed by the NTP utility is "the time" as far as the computer world cares. If you use anything else, people will ask - repeatedly - why you have the wrong time.
