they need to reclassify everything with labels instead of folders.
Why would you want to say that? They don't need to know how it's done. Labels look like folders and act like folders, so folders they are.
The only thing that Google mail does differently is it can show mail from multiple folders in one view. This capability can be retained, or the button "Label" can be removed altogether (Google certainly can do that at the source.) I'm sure if Google gets the contract they can spend five minutes on making their system UI-compatible with legacy systems.
I am not certain that "you might at one day sell your code to a foreign company that is somehow unable to do a global search-and-replace" should limit your design. You should write code appropriate to your domain.
If you write the code that is appropriate for your domain then one day some small company like SAP approaches you for acquisition, does its due diligence and then its coders scream bloody murder. The acquisition falls through. That would be kind of a high price to pay for a few keystrokes. Businesses exist to make money, not to multiply risks for no good reason.
Global search and replace is a risky thing; I did my share of refactoring and know that firsthand. This is particularly difficult when several languages are mixed (like assembly and C, which is common in embedded systems.) You need to be sure that each and every replacement is not already present in the scope, for example (but they may be allowed outside of the scope.) If you are selling a million LOC codebase (which is not something unique when you are being acquired) such refactoring in itself is a major project. Do you want to give the buyer a good reason to drop the price by 10% or 20% ? Probably not, if you are the owner. Business owners like to play it safe.
curly braces and square brackets which are rather inconvenient to type on a German QWERTZ keyboard
Buy a QWERTY keyboard for $10 (or whatever Euro equivalent,) plug it in and enjoy. You won't need too many ü, ä or ö in the C code, and if you do (in comments) then map them to something else. It's not that hard to remember keys for three characters. I do a similar thing myself for U+0451 and U+044a (they are mapped to Alt-Ctrl-8 and Alt-Ctrl-0.)
Well I don't see why they're any more likely to be kept in sync just because they're in a separate document
That's exactly because they don't have to be synchronized each time you make a small change. You can have the document written before the code, then you update it once or twice during the development, and then you do the final update when you are done and the code is released. This allows you to plan the work on documentation, as opposed to cramming it into an emergency fix when your boss is standing behind you, with airplane tickets in hand. (I had that happen to me more than once.)
The kind of diagram I'm talking about is (for instance) a geometric diagram that illustrates the reason that the particular bit of maths is being done in this particular way.
Per UNIX philosophy, combine existing tools instead of making a new one. Which means, draw your diagram in Visio, embed it into a MS Word document and be happy.
Besides, it is always better to have a document that, though still confidential, can be given to a 3rd party for review or for integration purposes without sending them the source.
1) Understands utf-8 source code (so we can get nice characters in comments)
MSVC already allows you to do that.
2) Allows diagrams to be embedded in source code as comments. ASCII may be fine for code, but it sure sucks for diagrams.
As a business owner, how much you are willing to pay your coders to draw these diagrams in the first place and then maintain them as the code changes? In my experience even plain text comments quickly get out of sync with the code. A complicated drawing will be cast aside at the very first death march - and you will need those marches, given that your coders spent time on drawing fancy pictures instead of coding.
There is another popular belief that says if you need lengthy comments about some piece of code then probably this piece of code needs to be rewritten.
I don't want to sound like I'm against diagrams and textual descriptions, but often they are better done in a separate document.
it might be fully resonable to have classes related to financial years (finansår), close of year (årsavslutning), the tax report (årsoppgave) and so on.
And one day the code is sold to China or India, and then people there can't even find a way to enter the glyph. Same if a visiting programmer has to work on the code, or if you need to send a class to another country for some reason.
How far Linux would get if Linus decided to use Finnish (or Swedish) words written with all the proper UNICODE characters for all the variables and types?
If you value the excitement of possibly becoming a millionaire at more than 20 cents it would be rational to buy that ticket.
Yes the "thrill" motivation has been already discussed in this thread. It is really orthogonal to the lottery itself, you can get your thrill from other things - gambling, bungie jumping, street racing or many other things.
You also have to factor in that most people spend very little money on the lottery. So little that it has no effect at all on their financial status even if they lose every time during their whole life.
Yes, that's where "bad at math" comes into play. When you replace cold, hard numbers with softy, squishy "feelings" you get that idea. In business this approach is also called "we lose money on every item shipped but make it up on volume."
Unfortunately, I couldn't understand most of your numeric examples. I must be bad at math:-) Perhaps someone else can look into them.
And it is different from other forms of gambling, how exactly? There is curious tendency to pick exclusively on lotteries.
Lotteries are frequently advertised, seen at 7-11 and other places. Casinos and roulettes are not even permitted in most places, you have to go somewhere to see them. Maybe that has something to do with the lotteries getting most of the ridicule.
When low income people gamble it because they are bad at math. When better off, highly educated people do it its because... of the THRILL of course!
I wouldn't equate people who are better off with people who are highly educated. There are rich mafia bosses who are barely literate, and there are brilliant scientists who are poor as a church mouse.
But I can't say how the ratio of the honest belief in a win vs. pure thrill depends on the social position of an individual. One factor, though, is that a lottery is a passive game, you get hardly any thrill out of it. I would expect more lottery players to play not for thrill but just for the money.
you don't really get to "literature" until maybe senior year, if at all.
Lucky you. I was forced to study literature for at least 4 years. It wasn't yesterday, though - courses change, and there is some variability between locales. For example, all composition themes were based on that literature - you were expected to take a scene or a theme from a book and go from there. You couldn't just write on "How I spent the summer." The problem is that most of the books that we studied were outside of my sphere of interest, and some subjects (like marital problems of some aristocrat in mid-1800's Russian Empire) were clearly beyond me. I wouldn't mind discussing Asimov's three laws, but that wasn't an option.
My point is that you could further optimize the school course by focusing on important things instead of the fluff. And most importantly the students should have an option to skip subjects that they hate. Anything else is torture - for them and for other students (who want to learn.)
"Why teach History?" -- So that we don't repeat past mistakes."
Very few people are in position to repeat, or not repeat, past mistakes. Those who are in those positions will do what is expedient at the moment regardless of what Napoleon's or Alexander's experience was. (They always think they can do better; sometimes they are right.)
"Why teach music? Other arts?" -- I ask myself these very same questions."
Theoretically, to expose students to that art. In practice, to clobber the students with learning of useless facts, like important dates in lives of major artists.
It merely increases the rate of failures in the school system by forcing people to take classes which they are not interested in and do not need.
I wholeheartedly agree, having suffered from this when I was "doing my time" in school.
There is still a finite limit to the population the Earth can support. The higher the average standard of living, the lower that limit will [be]
That is all true. Malthus would have been right if he was talking about animals. That's exactly how animal populations are determined - by available food, shelter, predators, diseases. However humans (most of them) don't make children just because it's that time of the year. If the conditions for production of children are unfavorable there will be fewer, or no children.
For example, the modern, western civilization financially penalizes parents for having children. They cost a lot to raise and they offer no return on that investment. People still have children, of course, because it's in the genes, but that can be adjusted up (in the 3rd world) or down (in the 1st world) by human mind.
Quite a few Sci-Fi writers depicted a future society where you need to win a lottery to have a child. This is not that far from current conditions in China, for example. Other writers describe a society that lives in oceans and in the space underground. [It doesn't have to be cramped, stinky and bad.] So Malthus didn't consider many factors that are now obvious.
Those that love advanced math, or merely those that are curious, will never need a government sponsored ad campaign to take a calculus class.
You also need to give them the chance to opt out of literature, music, dance and history and politics classes if they so desire - for the same reason.
Ultimately it means an official acceptance of the fact that people (children) are all different, and what is good for one is death (or boredom mixed with complete lack of a clue) for another.
But educators are hell-bent on "producing" a graduate who can sing, dance, read memorized poetry, run a mile in 15 seconds, solve nonlinear partial differential equations in their head, and be otherwise more educated than any adult (even a scientist!) out there.
This only results in production of demoralized students who are repeatedly told that they are too stupid to understand $subject and therefore they are a waste. Einstein got that treatment too, so this is not something new.
Educators are afraid that the student doesn't know what he is opting out of. So "for his own good" he should be taught music even though he can't tell the difference between 440 and 880 Hz, let alone be able to reproduce those without a frequency counter. Why then do we act surprised that children hate school?
But is it truly possible that a student makes a mistake in school? Sure it is. People make such mistakes even later in their life. A man in his 30's can drop a great business career, become an artist and travel the world. So students are not something exceptional here. Besides, if I hate literature in school I can always learn it later if I so desire - it's not like education is prohibited after you leave school.
The rigor and logic of proof-based mathematics would be far more valuable than the symbol manipulation of lower levels. [...] At times I wonder whether the whole of people is actually capable of doing it.
No. You need to find only one person who is incapable of a proof, and that can't be hard. Q.E.D.
It must be nice to own a submersible that can go down to the ground because the ocean depth there is 14,196 feet. Drilling 40 ft. down is yet another fun project.
But certainly it beats the traditional site at "the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity."
If a dog attacks and eventually kills someone it is put down. A child is not unlike a dog.
When you keep a dog you are expected to understand that dogs have teeth and can bite, and in a certain set of circumstances dogs can kill a human.
However nobody in their right mind would expect a 4 year old child to be able (let alone willing) to kill a human. And in this case this is exactly what hasn't happened. The death of the old lady was just an end of a long chain of events which started with old lady's illness - which prevented her first from walking away from the collision, and then from healing.
The little girl on a tricycle may have kicked the Rube Goldberg machine of the old lady's death into motion, but the girl certainly hasn't built the machine. The Nature (or her deity) did that.
That's the thing, you can sue until you're awarded gagillions of dollars - now go and try to collect it.
It may be not as difficult as you think. The child has her whole life ahead, and her parents are still working. The victim's family would love to get 30% of all their wages, practically forever. Free money.
Old people die all the time. Most often they die on their own, by falling or by some other injury, or from an illness. 87 years old is about the average time for that.
A collision of a child's tricycle and a healthy, middle-aged adult would have no consequences at all. The collision with the old lady caused her to fall. A healthy middle-aged adult, even if s/he falls, won't be seriously injured. But that lady was old, so she broke something.
When a healthy, middle-aged adult has a bone broken it is not fatal. It's certainly unpleasant, but in a month or two the person is healthy again. This old lady was old, and the injury was not that easy to repair; in fact, old people are not as receptive to treatments as young ones, and they often have a bunch of other illnesses that limit the choice of treatment or even make some impossible. Healing of bones is one such thing - they don't heal easily in old people.
So on one side we have a child who collided with an old lady. The child couldn't possibly know that this is dangerous, and most likely had no intent to collide in any case. On the other side we have an old lady who knew, or should have known, that children are walking accidents, that she herself is not young anymore, that if she falls she is likely to break a bone, and if she breaks a bone it's not easy to heal (often - impossible, like in this case.)
So who was more negligent here - a child who was in her rightful place doing things that all children do, or the old lady who in ill health ventured out into the midst of children on tricycles? Who should have known better?
If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed
HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars. I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance, rolling resistance, and the incline of the terrain when that comes along.
As others mentioned, the article is short on facts. I can drive 300 miles at 55 mph (average) and spend 0 kWh, as long as the road is downhill all the way, or if I use a sail. That fact alone is worthless.
I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house.
My house has 200A, 240V service (2 phases 120V each, 180 degrees off.) The maximum power is, therefore, 48 kW. The car will need 1.5 MW power source to charge in 6 minutes, and the battery would have to hold 150 kWh, or 540 MJ, equivalent to 1/8 ton of TNT or to 3 gallons of gasoline.
Slashdot Mirror
they need to reclassify everything with labels instead of folders.
Why would you want to say that? They don't need to know how it's done. Labels look like folders and act like folders, so folders they are.
The only thing that Google mail does differently is it can show mail from multiple folders in one view. This capability can be retained, or the button "Label" can be removed altogether (Google certainly can do that at the source.) I'm sure if Google gets the contract they can spend five minutes on making their system UI-compatible with legacy systems.
I am not certain that "you might at one day sell your code to a foreign company that is somehow unable to do a global search-and-replace" should limit your design. You should write code appropriate to your domain.
If you write the code that is appropriate for your domain then one day some small company like SAP approaches you for acquisition, does its due diligence and then its coders scream bloody murder. The acquisition falls through. That would be kind of a high price to pay for a few keystrokes. Businesses exist to make money, not to multiply risks for no good reason.
Global search and replace is a risky thing; I did my share of refactoring and know that firsthand. This is particularly difficult when several languages are mixed (like assembly and C, which is common in embedded systems.) You need to be sure that each and every replacement is not already present in the scope, for example (but they may be allowed outside of the scope.) If you are selling a million LOC codebase (which is not something unique when you are being acquired) such refactoring in itself is a major project. Do you want to give the buyer a good reason to drop the price by 10% or 20% ? Probably not, if you are the owner. Business owners like to play it safe.
curly braces and square brackets which are rather inconvenient to type on a German QWERTZ keyboard
Buy a QWERTY keyboard for $10 (or whatever Euro equivalent,) plug it in and enjoy. You won't need too many ü, ä or ö in the C code, and if you do (in comments) then map them to something else. It's not that hard to remember keys for three characters. I do a similar thing myself for U+0451 and U+044a (they are mapped to Alt-Ctrl-8 and Alt-Ctrl-0.)
Well I don't see why they're any more likely to be kept in sync just because they're in a separate document
That's exactly because they don't have to be synchronized each time you make a small change. You can have the document written before the code, then you update it once or twice during the development, and then you do the final update when you are done and the code is released. This allows you to plan the work on documentation, as opposed to cramming it into an emergency fix when your boss is standing behind you, with airplane tickets in hand. (I had that happen to me more than once.)
The kind of diagram I'm talking about is (for instance) a geometric diagram that illustrates the reason that the particular bit of maths is being done in this particular way.
Per UNIX philosophy, combine existing tools instead of making a new one. Which means, draw your diagram in Visio, embed it into a MS Word document and be happy.
Besides, it is always better to have a document that, though still confidential, can be given to a 3rd party for review or for integration purposes without sending them the source.
1) Understands utf-8 source code (so we can get nice characters in comments)
MSVC already allows you to do that.
2) Allows diagrams to be embedded in source code as comments. ASCII may be fine for code, but it sure sucks for diagrams.
As a business owner, how much you are willing to pay your coders to draw these diagrams in the first place and then maintain them as the code changes? In my experience even plain text comments quickly get out of sync with the code. A complicated drawing will be cast aside at the very first death march - and you will need those marches, given that your coders spent time on drawing fancy pictures instead of coding.
There is another popular belief that says if you need lengthy comments about some piece of code then probably this piece of code needs to be rewritten.
I don't want to sound like I'm against diagrams and textual descriptions, but often they are better done in a separate document.
it might be fully resonable to have classes related to financial years (finansår), close of year (årsavslutning), the tax report (årsoppgave) and so on.
And one day the code is sold to China or India, and then people there can't even find a way to enter the glyph. Same if a visiting programmer has to work on the code, or if you need to send a class to another country for some reason.
How far Linux would get if Linus decided to use Finnish (or Swedish) words written with all the proper UNICODE characters for all the variables and types?
Throw a buck or two at a chance to retire? Hey, from a personal point of view it makes a ton a sense.
Indeed - the state needs your money. Lotteries are not ran at loss. Thank you for playing :-)
If you value the excitement of possibly becoming a millionaire at more than 20 cents it would be rational to buy that ticket.
Yes the "thrill" motivation has been already discussed in this thread. It is really orthogonal to the lottery itself, you can get your thrill from other things - gambling, bungie jumping, street racing or many other things.
You also have to factor in that most people spend very little money on the lottery. So little that it has no effect at all on their financial status even if they lose every time during their whole life.
Yes, that's where "bad at math" comes into play. When you replace cold, hard numbers with softy, squishy "feelings" you get that idea. In business this approach is also called "we lose money on every item shipped but make it up on volume."
Unfortunately, I couldn't understand most of your numeric examples. I must be bad at math :-) Perhaps someone else can look into them.
Homeowner's insurance, for example, has an expected negative rate of return.
An insurance is not an investment, it's a service. If you are lucky you will never have an accident and all your service fees will be forever lost.
This was her long-term investment strategy.
There are worse long-term investment strategies out there :-)
And it is different from other forms of gambling, how exactly? There is curious tendency to pick exclusively on lotteries.
Lotteries are frequently advertised, seen at 7-11 and other places. Casinos and roulettes are not even permitted in most places, you have to go somewhere to see them. Maybe that has something to do with the lotteries getting most of the ridicule.
When low income people gamble it because they are bad at math. When better off, highly educated people do it its because... of the THRILL of course!
I wouldn't equate people who are better off with people who are highly educated. There are rich mafia bosses who are barely literate, and there are brilliant scientists who are poor as a church mouse.
But I can't say how the ratio of the honest belief in a win vs. pure thrill depends on the social position of an individual. One factor, though, is that a lottery is a passive game, you get hardly any thrill out of it. I would expect more lottery players to play not for thrill but just for the money.
you don't really get to "literature" until maybe senior year, if at all.
Lucky you. I was forced to study literature for at least 4 years. It wasn't yesterday, though - courses change, and there is some variability between locales. For example, all composition themes were based on that literature - you were expected to take a scene or a theme from a book and go from there. You couldn't just write on "How I spent the summer." The problem is that most of the books that we studied were outside of my sphere of interest, and some subjects (like marital problems of some aristocrat in mid-1800's Russian Empire) were clearly beyond me. I wouldn't mind discussing Asimov's three laws, but that wasn't an option.
My point is that you could further optimize the school course by focusing on important things instead of the fluff. And most importantly the students should have an option to skip subjects that they hate. Anything else is torture - for them and for other students (who want to learn.)
"Why teach History?" -- So that we don't repeat past mistakes."
Very few people are in position to repeat, or not repeat, past mistakes. Those who are in those positions will do what is expedient at the moment regardless of what Napoleon's or Alexander's experience was. (They always think they can do better; sometimes they are right.)
"Why teach music? Other arts?" -- I ask myself these very same questions."
Theoretically, to expose students to that art. In practice, to clobber the students with learning of useless facts, like important dates in lives of major artists.
It merely increases the rate of failures in the school system by forcing people to take classes which they are not interested in and do not need.
I wholeheartedly agree, having suffered from this when I was "doing my time" in school.
There is still a finite limit to the population the Earth can support. The higher the average standard of living, the lower that limit will [be]
That is all true. Malthus would have been right if he was talking about animals. That's exactly how animal populations are determined - by available food, shelter, predators, diseases. However humans (most of them) don't make children just because it's that time of the year. If the conditions for production of children are unfavorable there will be fewer, or no children.
For example, the modern, western civilization financially penalizes parents for having children. They cost a lot to raise and they offer no return on that investment. People still have children, of course, because it's in the genes, but that can be adjusted up (in the 3rd world) or down (in the 1st world) by human mind.
Quite a few Sci-Fi writers depicted a future society where you need to win a lottery to have a child. This is not that far from current conditions in China, for example. Other writers describe a society that lives in oceans and in the space underground. [It doesn't have to be cramped, stinky and bad.] So Malthus didn't consider many factors that are now obvious.
Those that love advanced math, or merely those that are curious, will never need a government sponsored ad campaign to take a calculus class.
You also need to give them the chance to opt out of literature, music, dance and history and politics classes if they so desire - for the same reason.
Ultimately it means an official acceptance of the fact that people (children) are all different, and what is good for one is death (or boredom mixed with complete lack of a clue) for another.
But educators are hell-bent on "producing" a graduate who can sing, dance, read memorized poetry, run a mile in 15 seconds, solve nonlinear partial differential equations in their head, and be otherwise more educated than any adult (even a scientist!) out there.
This only results in production of demoralized students who are repeatedly told that they are too stupid to understand $subject and therefore they are a waste. Einstein got that treatment too, so this is not something new.
Educators are afraid that the student doesn't know what he is opting out of. So "for his own good" he should be taught music even though he can't tell the difference between 440 and 880 Hz, let alone be able to reproduce those without a frequency counter. Why then do we act surprised that children hate school?
But is it truly possible that a student makes a mistake in school? Sure it is. People make such mistakes even later in their life. A man in his 30's can drop a great business career, become an artist and travel the world. So students are not something exceptional here. Besides, if I hate literature in school I can always learn it later if I so desire - it's not like education is prohibited after you leave school.
The rigor and logic of proof-based mathematics would be far more valuable than the symbol manipulation of lower levels. [...] At times I wonder whether the whole of people is actually capable of doing it.
No. You need to find only one person who is incapable of a proof, and that can't be hard. Q.E.D.
This the bill is 12.75, the guy gives you 20 euro and 75 cents, what change do you give him [...] Just take your 75 cents back for christ sake. 7.35.
12.75 + 7.35 = 20.10 - which means you gave him 10 cents more. No surprise you were fired from your job with these skillz :-)
"Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math."
North pole (well 40 ft underground at that point)
It must be nice to own a submersible that can go down to the ground because the ocean depth there is 14,196 feet. Drilling 40 ft. down is yet another fun project.
But certainly it beats the traditional site at "the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity."
blaming an entire nation for the actions of a small group is so advanced.
Consider this scenario:
Would it be at this point reasonable to blame the whole population of Elbonia for the act of terrorism?
If a dog attacks and eventually kills someone it is put down. A child is not unlike a dog.
When you keep a dog you are expected to understand that dogs have teeth and can bite, and in a certain set of circumstances dogs can kill a human.
However nobody in their right mind would expect a 4 year old child to be able (let alone willing) to kill a human. And in this case this is exactly what hasn't happened. The death of the old lady was just an end of a long chain of events which started with old lady's illness - which prevented her first from walking away from the collision, and then from healing.
The little girl on a tricycle may have kicked the Rube Goldberg machine of the old lady's death into motion, but the girl certainly hasn't built the machine. The Nature (or her deity) did that.
That's the thing, you can sue until you're awarded gagillions of dollars - now go and try to collect it.
It may be not as difficult as you think. The child has her whole life ahead, and her parents are still working. The victim's family would love to get 30% of all their wages, practically forever. Free money.
The child ran into the old lady ... the lady died.
Old people die all the time. Most often they die on their own, by falling or by some other injury, or from an illness. 87 years old is about the average time for that.
A collision of a child's tricycle and a healthy, middle-aged adult would have no consequences at all. The collision with the old lady caused her to fall. A healthy middle-aged adult, even if s/he falls, won't be seriously injured. But that lady was old, so she broke something.
When a healthy, middle-aged adult has a bone broken it is not fatal. It's certainly unpleasant, but in a month or two the person is healthy again. This old lady was old, and the injury was not that easy to repair; in fact, old people are not as receptive to treatments as young ones, and they often have a bunch of other illnesses that limit the choice of treatment or even make some impossible. Healing of bones is one such thing - they don't heal easily in old people.
So on one side we have a child who collided with an old lady. The child couldn't possibly know that this is dangerous, and most likely had no intent to collide in any case. On the other side we have an old lady who knew, or should have known, that children are walking accidents, that she herself is not young anymore, that if she falls she is likely to break a bone, and if she breaks a bone it's not easy to heal (often - impossible, like in this case.)
So who was more negligent here - a child who was in her rightful place doing things that all children do, or the old lady who in ill health ventured out into the midst of children on tricycles? Who should have known better?
Behold the power of iron, Lensmen :-)
gasoline packs an awful lot of energy into a small space
Yes, it does. Look at that chart and compare gasoline (or even coal) to Li-Ion batteries. Even sugar or fat (as in horses) are better.
If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed
HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars. I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance, rolling resistance, and the incline of the terrain when that comes along.
As others mentioned, the article is short on facts. I can drive 300 miles at 55 mph (average) and spend 0 kWh, as long as the road is downhill all the way, or if I use a sail. That fact alone is worthless.
I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house.
My house has 200A, 240V service (2 phases 120V each, 180 degrees off.) The maximum power is, therefore, 48 kW. The car will need 1.5 MW power source to charge in 6 minutes, and the battery would have to hold 150 kWh, or 540 MJ, equivalent to 1/8 ton of TNT or to 3 gallons of gasoline.