LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out.
There are two major issues I hit every single time I use MS Word (and given that I'm in a branch of Biology for my professional life, this usage is very frequent):
(1) It has a lot of bugs. Cross references get scrambled or just disappear. Moving figures around screws up the figures. The layout tools never seem to make sense, or to do rational things. It needlessly repaginates far too often. When I hit "PgDn" it goes not-quite-but-sometimes-almost a full page down. Fonts get continually screwed up. Formatting gets continually lost or weirdly modified.
(2) The default behavior on nearly every control is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but so brain-dead as to leave me often screaming: "in what world view is that the right thing to do, in what universe does that make sense?" I can feel my blood start to boil just writing this. When I start a new document, I half expect the language to be reset to Ancient Sanskrit (OK, that part about Sanskrit was hyperbole, but I can often be found screaming at MS Word because of the brain-dead defaults).
Contrast this with a program of at least comparable complexity like Adobe Photoshop. I know both of those programs about equally well -- which is to say casually. I think I've seen a bug in Photoshop maybe twice, perhaps three times total. Ever. (With MS Word, it's three every 10 minutes.) While the default behavior on tools might not be the best, at least they MAKE SENSE. With MS Word, I have the deep feeling that the program is fundamentally unknowable because there are no guiding principles to its operation. In contrast, with Photoshop, I suspect that with sufficient patience, I can learn to do amazing things because there is a fundamental organization waiting to be discovered.
There's no fundamental reason MS Word can't be a great program. All it needs is a pioneering visionary to thrash it down to a working core, to develop some well thought out guiding principles for how to organize the interface, to mercilessly eliminate the rampant bugs, to study how the current interface fails, and to rebuild it from that working core back up to a well-engineered product. But will that happen? Unlikely.
Here's the thing. This is a beautiful machine, yes. It embodies tremendous amounts of skill and knowledge, yes. But then, so did creating the beautiful structures that remain in Ancient Greece that were well-documented and we know are about 2500 years old (somewhat older than this device). The flutes on columns of buildings like the Parthenon, for example, were cut by hand, and yet are demonstrably as perfect as those cut by machine in modern times. The skill to do such precision work -- by many workers, so there was a means to ensure uniformity across tradesmen -- and the skill to produce buildings with lines that are just-so not quite straight, making them appear to be straight ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon ), makes it not surprising at all that the same populace could have produced something like the Antikythera Mechanism a few hundred years before the current date on the device.
Thanks very much for this post. I'm just starting to solicit volunteer subjects for my experiments (no, not kidding, I am a scientist studying visual perception), and have taken the oh-so-nice approach which hasn't been working all that well. I'll try the cut-and-dry approach for a while to see if it works better.
(I continue to be impressed at how informative the posts from low Slashdot ID members are.)
Linux has insane uptime. I can usually keep my box on indefinitely. I'll only turn it off when I accidentally pull out the cord when I'm reaching behind my desk or when I blow a fuse by running the microwave, toaster, and dishwasher at the same time.
Why have such a quick boot time when you hardly need to boot in the first place?
Because, in my experience, laptops are far less well-supported and far less reliable. My desktop machine currently has 100+ days of uptime, and the last power cycle was because of a scheduled power outage in the building. That uptime is typical for my desktops. In contrast, my laptop rarely goes more than a couple of days without needing a reboot because some driver or another gets into a fubar state. I use my desktop 8-10 hours per day, and my laptop 1-2 hours per day, so factor that in as well.
Couple that experience (which has been repeated over a number of desktops and a number of laptops, so I don't think is exceptional) with the fact that laptops are, I believe, outselling desktops and you have a need for quick boot times.
Also, Linux coming out of hibernation is dog slow. Doooooooooooggggggggg slow. It's far faster to boot up from scratch, for my laptop at least, and have to re-initialize my workspace than it is to wait for the RAM image to load from disk.
Sure, so long as you never need to make any changes to the code. The surviving COBOL coders have gone back into comfortable retirement with the money they made fixing Y2K. So they've moved from old iron to a modern operating system; they could still reap even more benefits by recoding for modern languages and coding practices.
But then, this is the US Postal Service. COBOL's probably fast enough for the task.
So you're saying that COBOL is so hideously difficult, so byzantine, so labyrinthine in nature that no one could possibly learn it now? That programmers educated today have no possibility of understanding a language that was designed some decades ago? You realize that C is 30 years old now, right?
This sort of fear mongering through ignorance is getting stale. COBOL is just another language, and one that happened to be designed for ease of expression for less-than-stellar programmers. Legions of students have learned enough C over a weekend to code up the examples in K&R, so I'm actually quite confident that professional programmers can, without any prior experience in COBOL, learn the language, even become proficient in it, in a brief enough time to make modifications to existing code bases.
Look, we're talking about learning a computer language and modifying or maintaining code, not learning Elizabethan English well enough to write a new Shakespeare play that can pass off as an original. It just isn't that hard.
With a stethoscope - you can say, 'This sound....it's almost always the result of X'. With the Rorschach pictures...you can't.
So, a lot of people don't see the benefit. And if the benefit is something like, 'Well, the highly trained professions therapist can pick up on the subtle undertones of the patient and gain insight into the blah, blah, blah' it really seems like you could just say, 'We observe the patient and notice that he's crazy'.
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that your exposure to medical information is limited to primarily watching ER, General Hospital, Bones, House, and the like on TV. And that your psychological experience is similarly informed.
Psychology is not an exact, hard science. But it is getting there. I'm the adult child of a clinical psychologist who specializes in testing. I also, in my line of work, specialize in behavioral tests, although to measure neuroscientific parameters rather than psychological ones. Testing is difficult. Having a well-understood tool with a wide body of reference material is important. Intentionally screwing up an important test by publishing the details about that test is unethical.
Beyond that, if the test requires the patient not knowing about the test in advance or understanding the test; that's a good reason to question the validity of the test.
If someone has a heart condition that can be detected with a stethoscope - knowing how the stethoscope works - does not affect the results. But, apparently, looking at the pictures, in advance, diminishes their effectiveness.
I'm not saying a Rorschach test is crap. I'm just explaining why I think it's probably crap.
Your attitude here demonstrates a deep naivite about psychological testing. Have you ever seen the famous images that have dual interpretation (eg, http://www.moillusions.com/2006/05/young-lady-or-old-hag.html)? Previous exposure to them makes a HUGE difference in how you answer. Massively huge. Unlike measuring, say, heartbeat, measuring mental state, and visual perception in particular, requires knowing whether or not a subject has previous exposure. It is much easier to assume that there has been zero previous exposure and normalize responses based on that assumption. Allowing previous exposure complicates the test to the point of uselessness. The problem is not that the inkblots are inherently flawed (though they may be for other reasons) but that visual perception is highly sensitive to previous experience.
And, in case you didn't realize, many physiological measurements are highly dependent on the psychological state of the subject. Your heartrate and blood pressure are generally higher when taken in a doctor's office than when taken at home because you are aware of the measurement being taken by someone in a lab coat in a stressful environment. Psychology influences physiology all over the place. That's the whole reason that double-blind testing is the gold standard for medical (even non-psychological) validation: not only does the mental state of the patient matter, the mental state of the doctor administering the test can as well!
So, while your analogy to a stethoscope might seem good at first, it's not really appropriate. Humans are not machines. Biology is messy, and psychology doubly so.
Did Windows 95 start the idea of using years instead of version numbers?
Nope -- it's a far older conceit than that. The earliest example I'm aware of is Fortran 66...
I believe Algol 60 predated that by a good 6 years, and Algol 58 by an additional two. While Algol 58 didn't see as wide usage, Algol 60 was, to many, the definitive version of that language.
people pick up a.0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a.5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
No, distribution packagers decided KDE 4.0 was good enough to include in their releases so it got sent out to a lot of people. I don't know if you tried 4.0, but I did. It was horrible. Saying, "it was not as polished and featureful," does not describe what happened with 4.0. KDE 4.0 was a huge, massive step backwards in functionality that should never have been considered for release. It was barely alpha-grade software at release time. It still contains idiotic major achitectural mistakes (like what amounts to an entirely new, and needlessly separate windowing system for the Plasma widgets) and requires a major reorganization to what goes where (I can never find the right submenu / screen to make adjustments because they're split over too many unrelated interfaces).
Blaming the users is shortsighted. Blaming the distro packagers makes some sense. But placing blame on the KDE team for the total cockup that was 4.0 is putting it where it is due. KDE4 is inching toward consistency and usability, but what we have NOW is what should have been the original release -- ignoring the massive mistakes in the redesign that remain deeply baked into Plasma.
The message here is simple: if you're going to radically redesign a product with a large user base, don't release the replacement until it's in much better condition than for minimal changes. With 4.0 and the introduction of Plasma, the KDE team should have (beyond being struck repeatedly with a two-by-four for being frelling nincompoops) skipped a release cycle in order to get things into better shape.
Meh, she'd still accumulate cellular damage and die of cancer eventually. Heart disease would also still be a possibility.
She'd probably die at 85 of pancreatic cancer or something, but look good doing it.
I think if you look carefully at the photos you can see signs of aging. She is aging, just not developing. The two are very different. Look, in particular, at the lines descending from her nose to around her mouth. As an infant, these lines are not apparent; as we get older they become more pronounced. For Brooke, these lines seem to be developing at about the same rate as her siblings, becoming apparent in the last two photos especially, suggesting that she is aging like them, but has not developed at all. This, in turn, would indicate a hormonal issue, as posited by another reply in this thread.
My speculation is that when she turns 30, Brooke will look like a 30 year old in the shape of a baby, except her skin will be somewhat less damaged since she spends most of her time inside.
Cutting would obviously be done by hand, or with a very slow speed reciprocating saw, which produce minimal vibration. They'd probably encase the whole thing in epoxy first to further reduce vibration.
Movement of the knob against the glass, no matter how slow, is potentially going to grind the glass away. Encasing the knob in epoxy isn't going to help unless the epoxy is also adhering to the glass to prevent relative motion between the knob and glass. And, in that case, there's the difficulty of removing the epoxy afterward. Could be done, but probably not a very good approach, and certainly not without risk.
If scratches can lead to "spontaneous catastrophic failure" in the window material then obviously there is zero risk because the window must have a strong scratch-proof covering, probably a thin layer of plexiglas or similar. Otherwise trivial incidents over the course of the shuttle's working life would pose an unacceptable risk--anything breaking loose on re-entry, in particular, could scratch the surface if it was not heavily protected.
The article (you did read the article before spouting off, right?) does not describe any coating that I saw. It does, however, describe the minimum acceptable damage to the outer stressed layer of the glass. Recall this is thermally stressed (aka Pyrex) glass, and if the outer compression layer is breached, it can, and does, lead to spontaneous catastrophic failure. That's why there are guidelines as to how deep a scratch is acceptable. Also recall that the compression layer is not one atomic layer, such that the glass can sustain some damage before failing. Note that this would still be true if there were any sort of plastic coating as well -- there would still be some limit of acceptable damage before risk of failure is too high.
More importantly, if the choice is a) scrap the shuttle early for sure or b) risk having to scrap it due to damage done during knob removal, the choice is so obvious that only a NASA engineer could get it wrong.
[snip]
Personally, I'm wondering why engineers rather than machinists are working on this problem. Engineers don't have the appropriate hands-on skills to deal with it. Machinists do.
Did you learn somewhere that there are no machinists working on the problem? Do you know engineers working at NASA, so you have the experience to make blanket statements about their ability like that? It just so happens that I do know engineers at NASA, and at some of their subcontractors. One can argue whether they are absolutely the very best in the world or not, but they are certainly world-class, and a damned sight better than any run-of-the-mill engineers around. Listen, these aren't stupid people. It is rocket science, and rocket science is hard. If you have never been to Johnson, I highly recommend it. And you can bet that if you or I had an idea after cogitating for 2 minutes about the extraction problem, someone who's job depends on it, who likely has a degree in aero-astro from MIT, who realizes the potential ramifications of screwing up, and who has spent many hours thinking about it non-stop, has already come up with it. Like asking a machinist for his thoughts.
Am I the only one thinking wearing it down with solvent or electrolysis might be the way to go? It looks like they've got pretty good access, they could even pour a silicone sealant past it to keep the solvent out of places it shouldn't be, then peel it out afterward.
Looking at the photos of attempts to use dry ice, it already appears they are doing things like applying sealants, or protecting the areas around the knob. Electrical dissolution is an interesting idea. I'd be worried about the heat it would generate, though.
Excellent and informed analysis. However, I think it is unlikely that "metal" knob could scratch glass. See the Moh hardness scale.
Hmm. You're saying you know what the knob is made of, and what the surface treatment of that material is? If, for example, it's aluminum with an anodization (as it looks to be in the photo), it may well scratch the glass. Scratching isn't the only issue, though, as if sufficient pressure has been applied, localized microscopic deformation might have occurred as well. If the compression layer of the tempered glass has been breached, the glass will fail. If it has been damaged beyond the stated engineering guidelines, as described in the article, the window will need to be replaced. The close up image in the article shows what appears to be damage to the glass at two points where the glass contacts the knob.
It's a simple problem that many of us have faced in one situation or another where something small has managed to get wedged where it shouldn't, and requires extraction. The difference here is that there are serious, and potentially highly costly, either in dollars or in human life, or both, potential ramifications to performing the extraction badly.
Seriously, I mean increase the pressure inside the shuttle until you have the same differential as in space, which should cause the windows to expand just as they did in space and then pull out the knob.
myke
Read the article. They've considered doing just that in a couple of different ways, using both cabin pressure, and local bladders inflated between dash and windshield.
Or is that only an outer protective layer? I know I've seen pictures of the pitting that micrometeors and paint flecks have caused on the Shuttles while in orbit, I just assumed they were made to be easily replaced.
The article isn't wholly clear, but implies that there are three layers of glass, only the outer one gets replaced. The inner ones have never been replaced on any shuttle. The innermost one is the most important for retaining the internal pressure, and is the one that has sustained damage.
And to be clear, if you read the article, it's obvious that the engineers working on this are SERIOUS and have thought of just about anything that slashdot readers have come up with. Drill/cut? Too high risk because of (a) vibrations transmitted to the window and microgrinding of the knob against the window and (b) metallic dust it will generate. Pressurize orbiter? Yep. For some reason, they think they can only get it to +3 PSI. Might help. Apply cold to the knob to shrink it? Yep. They tried dry ice. Didn't work. (My guess is that they'll try liquid nitrogen, too at some point.) They're planning on trying dry ice and pressurization at the same time. Apply downward pressure to the dash with a crobar? Probably very risky because of unknown damage it might cause to dash.
Once the knob is out, they'll make visual inspection of the remaining surface, including taking microscopic moldings to assess the damage. The pane is tempered, so scratches are a big problem, as they can lead to spontaneous, catastrophic failure.
And recall that as you view that movie, it's running at 1/4 resolution.
Saying, "I'd rather have XLR mic in and record real audio than use a DSLR as a video camera" is just being ill-informed about the capabilities of the 5D mk II. I'd rather use an adapter and record real video with the 5D mk II. My brother has one, and I've played a little with it (just a little): it is an amazing bit of technology. And Canon's glass is fantastic.
The problem is that GCC is pretty much the only compiler on Linux used these days and while the code is very nice C++ compilers on Windows produce a bit better code still.
In my experience, MS's VC++ produces not just a bit better code than gcc, but whole hocking meeses better code. VC++ is a damned good compiler, no matter what one might think about the company that generated it, while gcc is a merely decent one, no matter how much one might want to promote FOSS.
Not trying to be a troll here, but I'm guessing that those guys have never really had their asses handed to them before.
It was not only a supremely stupid thing to do without, at minimum, a police escort, but he also didn't pay the thief the promised reward for return of the phone (there was that handshake, see, implying a transaction and binding agreement). The author of the article was acting just like a thug.
The motivation aspect is valid, although rediculous that intelligent people worth anything need to be supervised / baby-sat to ensure that they do SOMETHING THAT THEY CHOOSE TO DO!
Sorry, can't pass up the opportunity: like learning to spell?
Benefitting greatly from discussing with other people, no shit, of course. That doesn't mean academic schooling -- that means schooling like fish. I spend loads of time with others in my industry. I don't require anything formal to do so. Conferences, convensions, friends, employees, competitors, clients. Call people, and they'll talk. Oh yeah, and fora, both on-line and off-line. Hey, I'm not at school now, and we're talking here.
You're saying you do this on a daily basis, over a protracted period of time, on a single focused set of subjects? Doubtful. I attend professional conventions, seminars and meetings regularly as part of my continued education, even organizing my own, and they pale in comparison to a properly designed curriculum. An educational experience might not have been all that worthwhile for you, but it certainly is worthwhile for the vast majority of people who elect to attend school at the levels we're discussing.
Finally learning how to think is something that's very important. Good news. Long ago I was taught how to learn to think. So now, whenever I need to learn to think, I can teach myself. That's a skill that was taught to me somewhere around grade 7, when I got my first real paying job.
Sorry, you're asserting that a seventh grader has already learned to think at the graduate level? Perhaps there are one or two instances of this world-wide, perhaps, but having spent the majority of my life in educational institutions of one form or another, I can assure you that graduate students are still being trained how to think, despite having much deeper and more developed abilities than grade school students. Your assertion is absurd on the face of it.
Starting a business really presses you to train yourself to do just about anything. And the first anything is to be capable of finding the resources necessary to learn anything.
And yet you didn't recommend that option to the OP. Why?
The OP has an entry-level position that he is growing out of. The current economy is horrible, doubly so for startups. The best bet for the OP is to continue working and, at the same time, to acquire additional skills that, if they are not appreciated by his current employer will stand him in good stead with a new employer. While some people -- a small minority -- are able to acquire such skills on their own, the vast majority are better off in a classroom setting.
That is not to say that all classroom settings are superior, or even worthwhile. Many are horrid. Many are good for not much more than passing certification tests or similar vocational milestones, or even catching up on sleep. I would advise the OP to away from these and find one that emphasize teaching, even if it takes a few tries to find the right program.
There are a few excellent reasons to go to school:
- your field has you using multi-million dollar equipment that you simply cannot access outside of the academic world
- you don't know what you want, and need someone to plot a course through life for you
- you can't read and need to be taught the alphabet
You've missed the most important one, no, strike that, two reasons to go to school. The primary reasons that schools exist at all.
Reason 1: Most people need to have a curriculum laid out in front of them by someone who is smarter, often older, and wiser than them (because, do I really have to point this out?, they are looking to study the subject, and by definition cannot know enough about it to design a proper curriculum themselves). In addition, most people also benefit very well from an external source of motivation: if someone else tells you, "do this by Tuesday at 10am," most -- not all, but most -- people will be more apt to get it done by the prescribed time than if they do it themselves. Maintaining motivation, especially over the months-to-years timescale, is very difficult for all but a few.
Reason 2: Most people benefit greatly from being able to discuss new ideas with other people and getting feedback from people who are more experienced. If you're not at school, who's going to grade your problem sets and quizzes? Who are you going to discuss the pros and cons of different solutions? Yes, a select few people are talented enough to not need this (and I've been fortunate enough to have attended schools where I got to see these stars shine very brightly, but even they benefit from exchanging ideas with their select group of peers) but most people are not like that. Most people learn better with others who are doing the same thing.
The rest of the parent comment rails on how educational experiences are all too outdated to be worth anything. The only thing I can say is that it sounds like the parent poster had a very different educational experience than me. And, also, that the parent poster missed the biggest reason of all to go to school, which is not to learn a subject but to learn how to think. In my undergraduate program, for example, there was no course specifically in one language or another (why bother when, as my work-study boss put it, you can pick up C over the weekend?), and, though the program, we were expected to learn about a dozen different languages along the way. We weren't trained in C, Java, Perl, or whatever flavor of the month, but, instead, trained how to learn a language and quickly become proficient in it. That knowledge is timeless. If you are going to school to learn the minutia of a subject rather than its principles, your time is being wasted.
My advice to the OP: keep your job, as they're hard to find at present, and get into a part-time educational program somewhere nearby, either evenings or weekends. But be prepared to spend some time finding a good program that teaches not this or that specific tool, but how tools work, and from this knowledge, you'll be able to use any tool at all.
Pathogenity requires extensive adaptive mechanisms from a microbe, otherwise it isn't able to live in an organism with an immune system. Microbes that cause human illnesses have through countless generations developed traits that enable them to grip molecules on human cells, thrive in tissues, and resist the immune cells' attempts to destroy them. The odds of a 120,000-year-old bacteria turning out to be dangerous are minuscule.
You're saying this because you're asserting that mammalian immune systems are radically different now than they were 120,000 years ago? Our genus (Homo, as in Homo sapiens) has been around for something like 2.5 million years. A bacterium from 120,000 years ago could well be infectious to humans.
If it werent for the 8086 being designed to easily handle 8085, 8080, and 8008 binaries, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The reason the x86 line was successfull has ALWAYS, in part, been compatability.
You can argue that other processors were better... but being better wasn't good enough, was it?
This comment should be marked as flamebait because that's so clearly what it is.
The one and only reason we're having this discussion is that IBM chose the 8088 for its PC, a project that was intended as an internal exploratory design exercise, and for which, nearly every EE who was alive and working at the time, lambasted IBM.
Remember the IBM-PC did NOT use the 8086, but the 8088, so lauding the 8086's compatibility is a mistake.
If the IBM engineers had chosen the MC6800 (Motorola's 8-bit equivalent to the 8088 which also had source compatibility with it's bigger and more advanced brethren) we would be about 10 years ahead of where we are now, because we wouldn't have lost so much worthless time worrying about broken memory architectures.
What was the point of a 32-bit address space in 1980-81 when the cost of memory was insanely high? What was the point of a 16-bit data bus when the cost of 16 bit hardware was incredibly high, if not outright non-existent in many cases?
In two words: virtual memory. Just because the address lines exist does not mean that the physical memory does.
Remember, the computer world did not spontaneously come into being with the design of the IBM-PC; it has existed for decades beforehand. One computer architecture I worked with in the 80s (contemporary to the introduction of the IBM-PC) had a 40 bit address space, with the very explicit idea that the huge number of addressing bits be used for intelligent organization of data.
Then-contemporary data busses were also routinely larger, and often MUCH larger than 8 bits. The Dec VAX architecture, for example, developed a decade before but still very active in the 1980s, had a 32 bit native word size.
You didn't write assembler for the M68K because then you would have known there were no 1 byte instructions. All of the instructions were 16 bits or multiples thereof.
Having said that, the 68K was a much better architecture for programming with. JeremyP's first law of assembler is that CPUs where the registers are numbered are easier to program for than CPUs where the registers have names.
You're right -- I wrote assembler for the 6800/6809 architectures which were the direct competitors for the 8088/8086 architecture (8 bit / 8 bit external, 16 bit internal). The 68000 was a significant step up compared to the 8088/8086, and, arguably, wasn't strictly speaking a direct competitor.
Slashdot Mirror
LaTeX sounds pretty powerful, but honestly Word has some powerful abilities that most people just never even try to figure out.
There are two major issues I hit every single time I use MS Word (and given that I'm in a branch of Biology for my professional life, this usage is very frequent):
(1) It has a lot of bugs. Cross references get scrambled or just disappear. Moving figures around screws up the figures. The layout tools never seem to make sense, or to do rational things. It needlessly repaginates far too often. When I hit "PgDn" it goes not-quite-but-sometimes-almost a full page down. Fonts get continually screwed up. Formatting gets continually lost or weirdly modified.
(2) The default behavior on nearly every control is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but so brain-dead as to leave me often screaming: "in what world view is that the right thing to do, in what universe does that make sense?" I can feel my blood start to boil just writing this. When I start a new document, I half expect the language to be reset to Ancient Sanskrit (OK, that part about Sanskrit was hyperbole, but I can often be found screaming at MS Word because of the brain-dead defaults).
Contrast this with a program of at least comparable complexity like Adobe Photoshop. I know both of those programs about equally well -- which is to say casually. I think I've seen a bug in Photoshop maybe twice, perhaps three times total. Ever. (With MS Word, it's three every 10 minutes.) While the default behavior on tools might not be the best, at least they MAKE SENSE. With MS Word, I have the deep feeling that the program is fundamentally unknowable because there are no guiding principles to its operation. In contrast, with Photoshop, I suspect that with sufficient patience, I can learn to do amazing things because there is a fundamental organization waiting to be discovered.
There's no fundamental reason MS Word can't be a great program. All it needs is a pioneering visionary to thrash it down to a working core, to develop some well thought out guiding principles for how to organize the interface, to mercilessly eliminate the rampant bugs, to study how the current interface fails, and to rebuild it from that working core back up to a well-engineered product. But will that happen? Unlikely.
Here's the thing. This is a beautiful machine, yes. It embodies tremendous amounts of skill and knowledge, yes. But then, so did creating the beautiful structures that remain in Ancient Greece that were well-documented and we know are about 2500 years old (somewhat older than this device). The flutes on columns of buildings like the Parthenon, for example, were cut by hand, and yet are demonstrably as perfect as those cut by machine in modern times. The skill to do such precision work -- by many workers, so there was a means to ensure uniformity across tradesmen -- and the skill to produce buildings with lines that are just-so not quite straight, making them appear to be straight ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon ), makes it not surprising at all that the same populace could have produced something like the Antikythera Mechanism a few hundred years before the current date on the device.
Thanks very much for this post. I'm just starting to solicit volunteer subjects for my experiments (no, not kidding, I am a scientist studying visual perception), and have taken the oh-so-nice approach which hasn't been working all that well. I'll try the cut-and-dry approach for a while to see if it works better.
(I continue to be impressed at how informative the posts from low Slashdot ID members are.)
Oh, *please* call it RadAway.
It already exists!
http://www.trianglebiomedical.com/products/RadAway.html
Linux has insane uptime. I can usually keep my box on indefinitely. I'll only turn it off when I accidentally pull out the cord when I'm reaching behind my desk or when I blow a fuse by running the microwave, toaster, and dishwasher at the same time.
Why have such a quick boot time when you hardly need to boot in the first place?
Because, in my experience, laptops are far less well-supported and far less reliable. My desktop machine currently has 100+ days of uptime, and the last power cycle was because of a scheduled power outage in the building. That uptime is typical for my desktops. In contrast, my laptop rarely goes more than a couple of days without needing a reboot because some driver or another gets into a fubar state. I use my desktop 8-10 hours per day, and my laptop 1-2 hours per day, so factor that in as well.
Couple that experience (which has been repeated over a number of desktops and a number of laptops, so I don't think is exceptional) with the fact that laptops are, I believe, outselling desktops and you have a need for quick boot times.
Also, Linux coming out of hibernation is dog slow. Doooooooooooggggggggg slow. It's far faster to boot up from scratch, for my laptop at least, and have to re-initialize my workspace than it is to wait for the RAM image to load from disk.
Sure, so long as you never need to make any changes to the code. The surviving COBOL coders have gone back into comfortable retirement with the money they made fixing Y2K. So they've moved from old iron to a modern operating system; they could still reap even more benefits by recoding for modern languages and coding practices.
But then, this is the US Postal Service. COBOL's probably fast enough for the task.
So you're saying that COBOL is so hideously difficult, so byzantine, so labyrinthine in nature that no one could possibly learn it now? That programmers educated today have no possibility of understanding a language that was designed some decades ago? You realize that C is 30 years old now, right?
This sort of fear mongering through ignorance is getting stale. COBOL is just another language, and one that happened to be designed for ease of expression for less-than-stellar programmers. Legions of students have learned enough C over a weekend to code up the examples in K&R, so I'm actually quite confident that professional programmers can, without any prior experience in COBOL, learn the language, even become proficient in it, in a brief enough time to make modifications to existing code bases.
Look, we're talking about learning a computer language and modifying or maintaining code, not learning Elizabethan English well enough to write a new Shakespeare play that can pass off as an original. It just isn't that hard.
With a stethoscope - you can say, 'This sound....it's almost always the result of X'. With the Rorschach pictures...you can't.
So, a lot of people don't see the benefit. And if the benefit is something like, 'Well, the highly trained professions therapist can pick up on the subtle undertones of the patient and gain insight into the blah, blah, blah' it really seems like you could just say, 'We observe the patient and notice that he's crazy'.
I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that your exposure to medical information is limited to primarily watching ER, General Hospital, Bones, House, and the like on TV. And that your psychological experience is similarly informed.
Psychology is not an exact, hard science. But it is getting there. I'm the adult child of a clinical psychologist who specializes in testing. I also, in my line of work, specialize in behavioral tests, although to measure neuroscientific parameters rather than psychological ones. Testing is difficult. Having a well-understood tool with a wide body of reference material is important. Intentionally screwing up an important test by publishing the details about that test is unethical.
Beyond that, if the test requires the patient not knowing about the test in advance or understanding the test; that's a good reason to question the validity of the test.
If someone has a heart condition that can be detected with a stethoscope - knowing how the stethoscope works - does not affect the results. But, apparently, looking at the pictures, in advance, diminishes their effectiveness.
I'm not saying a Rorschach test is crap. I'm just explaining why I think it's probably crap.
Your attitude here demonstrates a deep naivite about psychological testing. Have you ever seen the famous images that have dual interpretation (eg, http://www.moillusions.com/2006/05/young-lady-or-old-hag.html)? Previous exposure to them makes a HUGE difference in how you answer. Massively huge. Unlike measuring, say, heartbeat, measuring mental state, and visual perception in particular, requires knowing whether or not a subject has previous exposure. It is much easier to assume that there has been zero previous exposure and normalize responses based on that assumption. Allowing previous exposure complicates the test to the point of uselessness. The problem is not that the inkblots are inherently flawed (though they may be for other reasons) but that visual perception is highly sensitive to previous experience.
And, in case you didn't realize, many physiological measurements are highly dependent on the psychological state of the subject. Your heartrate and blood pressure are generally higher when taken in a doctor's office than when taken at home because you are aware of the measurement being taken by someone in a lab coat in a stressful environment. Psychology influences physiology all over the place. That's the whole reason that double-blind testing is the gold standard for medical (even non-psychological) validation: not only does the mental state of the patient matter, the mental state of the doctor administering the test can as well!
So, while your analogy to a stethoscope might seem good at first, it's not really appropriate. Humans are not machines. Biology is messy, and psychology doubly so.
The article states,
Did Windows 95 start the idea of using years instead of version numbers?
Nope -- it's a far older conceit than that. The earliest example I'm aware of is Fortran 66 ...
I believe Algol 60 predated that by a good 6 years, and Algol 58 by an additional two. While Algol 58 didn't see as wide usage, Algol 60 was, to many, the definitive version of that language.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL
people pick up a .0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a .5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
No, distribution packagers decided KDE 4.0 was good enough to include in their releases so it got sent out to a lot of people. I don't know if you tried 4.0, but I did. It was horrible. Saying, "it was not as polished and featureful," does not describe what happened with 4.0. KDE 4.0 was a huge, massive step backwards in functionality that should never have been considered for release. It was barely alpha-grade software at release time. It still contains idiotic major achitectural mistakes (like what amounts to an entirely new, and needlessly separate windowing system for the Plasma widgets) and requires a major reorganization to what goes where (I can never find the right submenu / screen to make adjustments because they're split over too many unrelated interfaces).
Blaming the users is shortsighted. Blaming the distro packagers makes some sense. But placing blame on the KDE team for the total cockup that was 4.0 is putting it where it is due. KDE4 is inching toward consistency and usability, but what we have NOW is what should have been the original release -- ignoring the massive mistakes in the redesign that remain deeply baked into Plasma.
The message here is simple: if you're going to radically redesign a product with a large user base, don't release the replacement until it's in much better condition than for minimal changes. With 4.0 and the introduction of Plasma, the KDE team should have (beyond being struck repeatedly with a two-by-four for being frelling nincompoops) skipped a release cycle in order to get things into better shape.
Meh, she'd still accumulate cellular damage and die of cancer eventually. Heart disease would also still be a possibility.
She'd probably die at 85 of pancreatic cancer or something, but look good doing it.
I think if you look carefully at the photos you can see signs of aging. She is aging, just not developing. The two are very different. Look, in particular, at the lines descending from her nose to around her mouth. As an infant, these lines are not apparent; as we get older they become more pronounced. For Brooke, these lines seem to be developing at about the same rate as her siblings, becoming apparent in the last two photos especially, suggesting that she is aging like them, but has not developed at all. This, in turn, would indicate a hormonal issue, as posited by another reply in this thread.
My speculation is that when she turns 30, Brooke will look like a 30 year old in the shape of a baby, except her skin will be somewhat less damaged since she spends most of her time inside.
Cutting would obviously be done by hand, or with a very slow speed reciprocating saw, which produce minimal vibration. They'd probably encase the whole thing in epoxy first to further reduce vibration.
Movement of the knob against the glass, no matter how slow, is potentially going to grind the glass away. Encasing the knob in epoxy isn't going to help unless the epoxy is also adhering to the glass to prevent relative motion between the knob and glass. And, in that case, there's the difficulty of removing the epoxy afterward. Could be done, but probably not a very good approach, and certainly not without risk.
If scratches can lead to "spontaneous catastrophic failure" in the window material then obviously there is zero risk because the window must have a strong scratch-proof covering, probably a thin layer of plexiglas or similar. Otherwise trivial incidents over the course of the shuttle's working life would pose an unacceptable risk--anything breaking loose on re-entry, in particular, could scratch the surface if it was not heavily protected.
The article (you did read the article before spouting off, right?) does not describe any coating that I saw. It does, however, describe the minimum acceptable damage to the outer stressed layer of the glass. Recall this is thermally stressed (aka Pyrex) glass, and if the outer compression layer is breached, it can, and does, lead to spontaneous catastrophic failure. That's why there are guidelines as to how deep a scratch is acceptable. Also recall that the compression layer is not one atomic layer, such that the glass can sustain some damage before failing. Note that this would still be true if there were any sort of plastic coating as well -- there would still be some limit of acceptable damage before risk of failure is too high.
More importantly, if the choice is a) scrap the shuttle early for sure or b) risk having to scrap it due to damage done during knob removal, the choice is so obvious that only a NASA engineer could get it wrong.
[snip]
Personally, I'm wondering why engineers rather than machinists are working on this problem. Engineers don't have the appropriate hands-on skills to deal with it. Machinists do.
Did you learn somewhere that there are no machinists working on the problem? Do you know engineers working at NASA, so you have the experience to make blanket statements about their ability like that? It just so happens that I do know engineers at NASA, and at some of their subcontractors. One can argue whether they are absolutely the very best in the world or not, but they are certainly world-class, and a damned sight better than any run-of-the-mill engineers around. Listen, these aren't stupid people. It is rocket science, and rocket science is hard. If you have never been to Johnson, I highly recommend it. And you can bet that if you or I had an idea after cogitating for 2 minutes about the extraction problem, someone who's job depends on it, who likely has a degree in aero-astro from MIT, who realizes the potential ramifications of screwing up, and who has spent many hours thinking about it non-stop, has already come up with it. Like asking a machinist for his thoughts.
Am I the only one thinking wearing it down with solvent or electrolysis might be the way to go? It looks like they've got pretty good access, they could even pour a silicone sealant past it to keep the solvent out of places it shouldn't be, then peel it out afterward.
Looking at the photos of attempts to use dry ice, it already appears they are doing things like applying sealants, or protecting the areas around the knob. Electrical dissolution is an interesting idea. I'd be worried about the heat it would generate, though.
Excellent and informed analysis. However, I think it is unlikely that "metal" knob could scratch glass. See the Moh hardness scale.
Hmm. You're saying you know what the knob is made of, and what the surface treatment of that material is? If, for example, it's aluminum with an anodization (as it looks to be in the photo), it may well scratch the glass. Scratching isn't the only issue, though, as if sufficient pressure has been applied, localized microscopic deformation might have occurred as well. If the compression layer of the tempered glass has been breached, the glass will fail. If it has been damaged beyond the stated engineering guidelines, as described in the article, the window will need to be replaced. The close up image in the article shows what appears to be damage to the glass at two points where the glass contacts the knob.
It's a simple problem that many of us have faced in one situation or another where something small has managed to get wedged where it shouldn't, and requires extraction. The difference here is that there are serious, and potentially highly costly, either in dollars or in human life, or both, potential ramifications to performing the extraction badly.
Seriously, I mean increase the pressure inside the shuttle until you have the same differential as in space, which should cause the windows to expand just as they did in space and then pull out the knob.
myke
Read the article. They've considered doing just that in a couple of different ways, using both cabin pressure, and local bladders inflated between dash and windshield.
Or is that only an outer protective layer? I know I've seen pictures of the pitting that micrometeors and paint flecks have caused on the Shuttles while in orbit, I just assumed they were made to be easily replaced.
The article isn't wholly clear, but implies that there are three layers of glass, only the outer one gets replaced. The inner ones have never been replaced on any shuttle. The innermost one is the most important for retaining the internal pressure, and is the one that has sustained damage.
And to be clear, if you read the article, it's obvious that the engineers working on this are SERIOUS and have thought of just about anything that slashdot readers have come up with. Drill/cut? Too high risk because of (a) vibrations transmitted to the window and microgrinding of the knob against the window and (b) metallic dust it will generate. Pressurize orbiter? Yep. For some reason, they think they can only get it to +3 PSI. Might help. Apply cold to the knob to shrink it? Yep. They tried dry ice. Didn't work. (My guess is that they'll try liquid nitrogen, too at some point.) They're planning on trying dry ice and pressurization at the same time. Apply downward pressure to the dash with a crobar? Probably very risky because of unknown damage it might cause to dash.
Once the knob is out, they'll make visual inspection of the remaining surface, including taking microscopic moldings to assess the damage. The pane is tempered, so scratches are a big problem, as they can lead to spontaneous, catastrophic failure.
Can't we turn it into biodiesel with algae farms? That would be win-win.
You mean like this company does? http://www.greenfuelonline.com/
(Disclaimer: I have a good friend who is an equity stakeholder.)
Maybe you should reconsider terminology; the 5D mk II isn't just a DSLR. It's a DSLR that shoots amazing video.
Have you seen this? http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2326
And recall that as you view that movie, it's running at 1/4 resolution.
Saying, "I'd rather have XLR mic in and record real audio than use a DSLR as a video camera" is just being ill-informed about the capabilities of the 5D mk II. I'd rather use an adapter and record real video with the 5D mk II. My brother has one, and I've played a little with it (just a little): it is an amazing bit of technology. And Canon's glass is fantastic.
The problem is that GCC is pretty much the only compiler on Linux used these days and while the code is very nice C++ compilers on Windows produce a bit better code still.
In my experience, MS's VC++ produces not just a bit better code than gcc, but whole hocking meeses better code. VC++ is a damned good compiler, no matter what one might think about the company that generated it, while gcc is a merely decent one, no matter how much one might want to promote FOSS.
Not trying to be a troll here, but I'm guessing that those guys have never really had their asses handed to them before.
It was not only a supremely stupid thing to do without, at minimum, a police escort, but he also didn't pay the thief the promised reward for return of the phone (there was that handshake, see, implying a transaction and binding agreement). The author of the article was acting just like a thug.
The motivation aspect is valid, although rediculous that intelligent people worth anything need to be supervised / baby-sat to ensure that they do SOMETHING THAT THEY CHOOSE TO DO!
Sorry, can't pass up the opportunity: like learning to spell?
Benefitting greatly from discussing with other people, no shit, of course. That doesn't mean academic schooling -- that means schooling like fish. I spend loads of time with others in my industry. I don't require anything formal to do so. Conferences, convensions, friends, employees, competitors, clients. Call people, and they'll talk. Oh yeah, and fora, both on-line and off-line. Hey, I'm not at school now, and we're talking here.
You're saying you do this on a daily basis, over a protracted period of time, on a single focused set of subjects? Doubtful. I attend professional conventions, seminars and meetings regularly as part of my continued education, even organizing my own, and they pale in comparison to a properly designed curriculum. An educational experience might not have been all that worthwhile for you, but it certainly is worthwhile for the vast majority of people who elect to attend school at the levels we're discussing.
Finally learning how to think is something that's very important. Good news. Long ago I was taught how to learn to think. So now, whenever I need to learn to think, I can teach myself. That's a skill that was taught to me somewhere around grade 7, when I got my first real paying job.
Sorry, you're asserting that a seventh grader has already learned to think at the graduate level? Perhaps there are one or two instances of this world-wide, perhaps, but having spent the majority of my life in educational institutions of one form or another, I can assure you that graduate students are still being trained how to think, despite having much deeper and more developed abilities than grade school students. Your assertion is absurd on the face of it.
Starting a business really presses you to train yourself to do just about anything. And the first anything is to be capable of finding the resources necessary to learn anything.
And yet you didn't recommend that option to the OP. Why?
The OP has an entry-level position that he is growing out of. The current economy is horrible, doubly so for startups. The best bet for the OP is to continue working and, at the same time, to acquire additional skills that, if they are not appreciated by his current employer will stand him in good stead with a new employer. While some people -- a small minority -- are able to acquire such skills on their own, the vast majority are better off in a classroom setting.
That is not to say that all classroom settings are superior, or even worthwhile. Many are horrid. Many are good for not much more than passing certification tests or similar vocational milestones, or even catching up on sleep. I would advise the OP to away from these and find one that emphasize teaching, even if it takes a few tries to find the right program.
There are a few excellent reasons to go to school:
- your field has you using multi-million dollar equipment that you simply cannot access outside of the academic world
- you don't know what you want, and need someone to plot a course through life for you
- you can't read and need to be taught the alphabet
You've missed the most important one, no, strike that, two reasons to go to school. The primary reasons that schools exist at all.
Reason 1: Most people need to have a curriculum laid out in front of them by someone who is smarter, often older, and wiser than them (because, do I really have to point this out?, they are looking to study the subject, and by definition cannot know enough about it to design a proper curriculum themselves). In addition, most people also benefit very well from an external source of motivation: if someone else tells you, "do this by Tuesday at 10am," most -- not all, but most -- people will be more apt to get it done by the prescribed time than if they do it themselves. Maintaining motivation, especially over the months-to-years timescale, is very difficult for all but a few.
Reason 2: Most people benefit greatly from being able to discuss new ideas with other people and getting feedback from people who are more experienced. If you're not at school, who's going to grade your problem sets and quizzes? Who are you going to discuss the pros and cons of different solutions? Yes, a select few people are talented enough to not need this (and I've been fortunate enough to have attended schools where I got to see these stars shine very brightly, but even they benefit from exchanging ideas with their select group of peers) but most people are not like that. Most people learn better with others who are doing the same thing.
The rest of the parent comment rails on how educational experiences are all too outdated to be worth anything. The only thing I can say is that it sounds like the parent poster had a very different educational experience than me. And, also, that the parent poster missed the biggest reason of all to go to school, which is not to learn a subject but to learn how to think. In my undergraduate program, for example, there was no course specifically in one language or another (why bother when, as my work-study boss put it, you can pick up C over the weekend?), and, though the program, we were expected to learn about a dozen different languages along the way. We weren't trained in C, Java, Perl, or whatever flavor of the month, but, instead, trained how to learn a language and quickly become proficient in it. That knowledge is timeless. If you are going to school to learn the minutia of a subject rather than its principles, your time is being wasted.
My advice to the OP: keep your job, as they're hard to find at present, and get into a part-time educational program somewhere nearby, either evenings or weekends. But be prepared to spend some time finding a good program that teaches not this or that specific tool, but how tools work, and from this knowledge, you'll be able to use any tool at all.
Pathogenity requires extensive adaptive mechanisms from a microbe, otherwise it isn't able to live in an organism with an immune system. Microbes that cause human illnesses have through countless generations developed traits that enable them to grip molecules on human cells, thrive in tissues, and resist the immune cells' attempts to destroy them. The odds of a 120,000-year-old bacteria turning out to be dangerous are minuscule.
You're saying this because you're asserting that mammalian immune systems are radically different now than they were 120,000 years ago? Our genus (Homo, as in Homo sapiens) has been around for something like 2.5 million years. A bacterium from 120,000 years ago could well be infectious to humans.
Short sighted marketing decision?
If it werent for the 8086 being designed to easily handle 8085, 8080, and 8008 binaries, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The reason the x86 line was successfull has ALWAYS, in part, been compatability.
You can argue that other processors were better... but being better wasn't good enough, was it?
This comment should be marked as flamebait because that's so clearly what it is.
The one and only reason we're having this discussion is that IBM chose the 8088 for its PC, a project that was intended as an internal exploratory design exercise, and for which, nearly every EE who was alive and working at the time, lambasted IBM.
Remember the IBM-PC did NOT use the 8086, but the 8088, so lauding the 8086's compatibility is a mistake.
If the IBM engineers had chosen the MC6800 (Motorola's 8-bit equivalent to the 8088 which also had source compatibility with it's bigger and more advanced brethren) we would be about 10 years ahead of where we are now, because we wouldn't have lost so much worthless time worrying about broken memory architectures.
What was the point of a 32-bit address space in 1980-81 when the cost of memory was insanely high? What was the point of a 16-bit data bus when the cost of 16 bit hardware was incredibly high, if not outright non-existent in many cases?
In two words: virtual memory. Just because the address lines exist does not mean that the physical memory does.
Remember, the computer world did not spontaneously come into being with the design of the IBM-PC; it has existed for decades beforehand. One computer architecture I worked with in the 80s (contemporary to the introduction of the IBM-PC) had a 40 bit address space, with the very explicit idea that the huge number of addressing bits be used for intelligent organization of data.
Then-contemporary data busses were also routinely larger, and often MUCH larger than 8 bits. The Dec VAX architecture, for example, developed a decade before but still very active in the 1980s, had a 32 bit native word size.
You didn't write assembler for the M68K because then you would have known there were no 1 byte instructions. All of the instructions were 16 bits or multiples thereof.
Having said that, the 68K was a much better architecture for programming with. JeremyP's first law of assembler is that CPUs where the registers are numbered are easier to program for than CPUs where the registers have names.
You're right -- I wrote assembler for the 6800/6809 architectures which were the direct competitors for the 8088/8086 architecture (8 bit / 8 bit external, 16 bit internal). The 68000 was a significant step up compared to the 8088/8086, and, arguably, wasn't strictly speaking a direct competitor.