Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.
A filter is only useful though if it removes the bad applicants and leaves the good applicants. Filtering by language (/framework) although common is also a very good way to exclude a significant amount of programming talent on the basis that you don't want to give them a few weeks to get productive in your pet language/framework. I've never interviewed (or applied) at either but both Google and Apple seem to have more farsighted hiring practices than that.
One, he was given the maximum sentence available for the crimes he was charged with. In his sentencing hearing murder for hire was brought up by the prosecution, just as his supposedly good character was brought up by his parents. Both parties can say whatever they want in a sentencing hearing, as long as the judge sentences within the guidelines for the crime the criminal has been found guilty it is not an issue.
Two, he has been charged, separately with murder for hire. The case is in progress. If found guilty, he will be sentenced separately within the guidelines for that crime.
Men are better negotiators than women? Since when?
Sounds more like sticking some makeup on a decision to hardball candidates. Her original lawsuit ended up being pretty merit-less as well. She couldn't even win her unfair dismissal claim.
Objective-C is an ugly, clunky language, and the only reason Apple uses it is to intentionally make your code incompatible with other platforms.
I'm not a particular fan of Objective-C either but this is just wrong. Apple inherited Objective-C when they bought NextStep and used it as the foundation of OS X. OS-X got its start in life as a partial rewrite of the NS shell and the addition of some compatibility layers (Classic Mac OS, Java,.etc.) to make up for the lack of applications. At this stage, there would have to be really really major benefits to a rewrite to justify the direct cost, not to mention the opportunity cost.
Something's definitely up if they're getting valued at $40 billion! That's 4 times the UK's annual agricultural output!
Interesting point. I dont't think that your statistics on farming in the UK are correct though. The total output of the UK agricultural industry in 2013 was 25,902 million pounds (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/379757/agriaccounts-tiffstatsnotice-27nov14.pdf) or at current exchange rates approximately $40 billion. The statistic you are using, I imagine, is the value added income (total ouput - inputs).
Uber is worth about one year of agriculture produce from the UK. Still seems like a very speculative valuation..
Because its requirements, chosen by its designer, were misguided and impossible to achieve with a clean, elegant design.
I don't think a clean, elegant design was ever the goal. It was built as a practical set of design compromises to fill the needs of the industry at the time.
The ugly compromise approach set back OO programming momentum, cost millions of person-years of unnecessary debugging effort and allowed many, many continued buffer overflow exploits etc. that ruin the reputation of software in general.
I think it is worth pointing out that there are plenty of languages that took the non-compromising approach and have fallen into obscurity while C++ took off. In the end it was the compromises of C++ that the software industry as a whole actually wanted. C++ for a long time has provided tools such as std::string and std::vector, to mitigate/eliminate the risk of buffer overflow vulnerabilities. The C string functions are terribly designed, but programmers wanted to and chose to continue to use them, that's not the fault of C++.
Personally I'll take the productivity and maintainability of Java/C# over C++ if I can. When I can't though, C++ isn't a bad option. It certainly has its pitfalls/complexity. Some were bad design choices (e.g. exceptions can throw any type). Some were unavoidable (e.g. the interplay of virtual functions/inheritance with in place allocation). Some are technical debt.
A safety systems programming language sounds great but they had to ruin it by putting a garbage collector in it. This makes it useless for systems programming.
So 17.5 million men should have the same last name as him, if he had one.
Presumably the women he raped, who then bore sons for him didn't take on his last name. (That is if he had a last name)
Maybe someone else can do the math
I fitted a simple exponential curve. Assuming 800 years have passed, and one new generation is formed every 20 years we get the range t : [0,40]. Assuming for f(t): f(0) = 1 and f(40) = 17.5m, I get f(t) = e^(0.181076t). This means the ratio of f(t+1):f(t) is ~1.5, so each generation would have to leave about 1.5 male descendants.
I'm surprised that.Net doesn't have more popularity in other countries. It has full Unicode support for strings and identifiers.
I'm confused to what you mean by.Net not having more popularity in other countries. Do you mean, you expect that it would enjoy (even) greater popularity levels than it does in English speaking countries?
The simple answer to that is there are more important factors (fitness for task at hand.etc.) in influencing language choice. Where I am (Japan).Net and Java have plenty of popularity, although nobody writes identifier names in non-ASCII characters. Conversly, desktop Linux which has rather poor Japanese support (Buggy, sub-standard input methods, poor translations, and painful font support) seems (I have no statistics) to have less popularity.
Learning a language is a multi-year undertaking full stop (unless you already speak a closely related language) and novels are generally the most difficult reading materials. Even learning German or French, I expect it would take several years of study to reach the point where I could read a novel.
I think what you mentioned about alternate Japanese readings explains why I've heard Japanese write out or otherwise indicate which kanji are used in their name when meeting someone.
I imagine the Chinese and Koreans do that as well. The characters used to write names are part of people's identity and generally carefully selected by parents. There can be literally hundreds of different ways to write the same name in Japanese. 'Kazuo' is a good example. The name itself simply means first born (son) but there are many different choices of characters to represent it, with the characters for either 'one' or 'harmony' (wa) being common choices to write 'kazu'
The pragmatic side of me sometimes wishes everyone simply spoke a common language, but the artistic side of my brain would certainly lament the loss of so much culture that a multitude of languages represents. Hanzi/kanji characters are quite beautiful as an art form, even if I don't know the meaning of them.
I couldn't agree more. Language and orthography are fascinating topics, intrinsically linked with culture.
Yeah sure, it's not an iron rule. I could name plenty of exceptions as well, but its pretty damn consistent. Most of the exceptions are words formed by combining Japanese words, or using kanji for their phonetic value (e.g. country names) rather than words formed from Chinese character roots.
Chinese characters aren't that hard to learn. I learnt them (a subset anyway) while learning Japanese. It took about 3 years of reasonably intense study to be able to pick up and read a novel without too much difficulty. After 2 years I could generally approach newspaper articles. Newspapers are generally one of the easiest written mediums to approach. While there are several thousand characters in use, there is a relatively small subset of frequently used characters. Additional most characters are formed in a regular fashion from simpler characters. Probably the most common form being one phonetic part to indicate the reading and one semantic part to indicate the meaning.
Chinese (apparently) has more characters in common use than Japanese but the difficulty does not scale linearly with the number of characters and Japanese adds the significant complication of having phonetic (Chinese derived) readings and often multiple, irregular native Japanese readings per character, and huge numbers of irregular readings for combinations of characters.
One interesting side affect of characters having semantic meaning is that it often makes the meaning of words even new to the reader, immediately obvious. Especially for science and technology related vocabulary the meanings of words rendered in Chinese characters is often much clearer and more immediately obvious than that of English words derived from Latin/Greek. As an extreme example I can often comprehend Chinese (esp. when written in traditional characters) even though I do not speak Chinese
One interesting piece of history about this project is that they switched from using C/GTK to using C++/QT recently and apparently with very good results. Especially interesting given the way Linus' past comments on C++ have been so widely replayed.
Your reply is also somewhat confusing to me. I don't think you've actually looked into the issue..NET popularity has gone downhill as more developers want to use more dynamic and developer-oriented solutions which are almost invariably open source. This is an actual trend; a real statistic, and essentially the reason why MS went ahead and open sourced.NET.
If it is a real trend and a real statistic then please link to some reference for this. I'm interested to see. Maybe I'm not very good at Google searches but I cannot find any reliable statistics to support this.
As for C and.NET you can use.NET quite easily with C. Even if your project is strictly in C#, if you know C I doubt you'd have much trouble with C# (other than maybe getting the hang of good-practices?).
I code mostly in C++ and C# and have no trouble at all with C#. It's one of my favourite languages. My post however was not about myself, I was paraphrasing the original question, as perhaps I've missed something but the statement "why you are asking for citation when the whole discussion is sort of based on this issue" is completely at odds with how I read the original question - i.e. (very much paraphrasing here) 'Should I learn C# it seems to be the way forward'
Though even if your interpretation of the original question is correct, it would still not seem unreasonable to ask for a reference to support the statement that.NET is losing popularity. The only evidence of this "fact" I can see on this thread is mis-matched anecdotes, hence my reply to your post.
Why? A sincere question, not a snark. Is it multi-programing-language support? The Microsoft IDE (VS?) What is it that wins over the Java ecosystem?
I'm not the OP but while Java is not a bad programming language at all, in my opinion C# is much nicer. It is pretty much Java but with more features and candy. Java has finally caught up with a few of the big ones - e.g. lambdas, try-resource to match C#'s using blocks, the streaming API to kind of capture part of LINQ's functionality and default methods to kind of match extension methods as a way to do mixins.
It's still lacks a lot of features though - e.g. generics with support for unboxed types and runtime type checking, unsigned types, stack allocated arrays/structs, support for unsafe code and pointers, coroutines, type inference on variable declerations, properties and property initializer syntax, operator overloading, language level support for async programming constructs, nullable types and the '??' operator, dynamic types,.etc. C# 6 will also be adding the '.?' to allow propagation of null through chained methods
In addition to this I feel like the core.NET libraries have generally benefited from the hindsite of seeing where Java went wrong / could be improved on.
Yeah, this is a big one, and it's especially painful when working with programmers who are less competent.
If you are writing it yourself, you can just wrap everything in try{}catch{}, which is what I do, but you never no what method is going to throw an exception.
Agreed about the docs. MSDN documentation in general is horrendous. It lacks critical information and is generally written in a completly impenetrable way. They also rely on crappy machine translation for non-English languages, ugh.
There is one good reason for avoiding checked exceptions though. Interfaces. In Java it is required that either 1. all exceptions that might ever be thrown by implementations of an interface be declared at the interface decleration or 2. all exceptions be bundled in RuntimeExceptions to short circuit the checked exception mechanism anyway (with the potential side effect of ruining stack traces).
As far as catching exceptions go, imo unless you are going to do something specific to deal with an exception, then catching it is bad coding practice. E.g. Catching a SocketException to implement retry logic - sure go for it. Catching an exception to log it and rethrow (or worse throw your own custom exception and ruin the stack trace) - do this as high up the call stack as possible.
Uhh....NET usage has been falling for many years now, that's why they made it open source to try and recover from that trend. I'm confused as to why you are asking for citation when the whole discussion is sort of based on this issue. Also note that headhunters looking for.NET devs could be the result of devs *leaving*.NET causing a lack of hands and thusly an increased need.
As far as I can see the premise of the original question is that 'my employees like.NET but I'm happy in C and about to retire, should I bother learning it'? Nothing about that implies that.NET is fading. In fact it seems to imply the exact opposite to me. In the hypothetical situation that it did imply that.NET is fading though, that still wouldn't make it a fact. Is there actual evidence that.NET is failing? All I can see on this Slashdot thread is mis-matched anecdotes.
Which is probably more important than anything else. The benefit of open sourcing.net core is that mono will get better. So if you have a lot of existing.net code and want to get away from ms licensing, at least ms will keep the dev tool revenue.
From (mostly indirect) experience, maybe it does for CRUD apps. For complicated applications though you might get ~30% code sharing and a lot of pain.
I've never found the antipodal argument convincing. Seismic waves converge at the antipode of an impact only if the target is spherically symmetric and isotropic. In the actual Earth, you have reflections off all kinds of laterally varying boundaries. Also, the sound speed differs substantially between continental and oceanic crust, so the path matters quite a bit.
The Chixulub impact is also not that big (as planetary-scale impacts go). The projectile was what, 10 km? Shock heating is only significant within a few times the projectile diameter.
I'm not a geophysicist but I do write software for the field so so I do have some limited knowledge of it. With the disclaimer out of the way, forgive me if I am wrong but:
1. Would anistropy mater much in this situation? I know it matters a lot in seismic tomography but the magnitude of the waves here is, well, of a completly different order of magnitude (excuse the pun). Would the physics creating angle dependent and/or horizontal velocity variations in the crust still hold up? Would they mater much on this scale? Presumably the waves are spending most of the time traveling through the mantle.
2. Similarly is being exactly spherically symmetric that important? Are the other stellar bodies were the antipodal phenomenon has been observed exactly spherically symmetric?
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation35.html provides a reasonably good summary of the pro-antipodal argument. Even if the waves are not focusing on an exact point with equally timed first-arrivals you could still reasonably expect see something resembling antipodal effects.
Only if you think that being off by about 10,000 km is "reasonably good". What kills the "killer" asteroid hypothesis is that the bulk of the biogeostratigraphic and high-resolution geochronological evidence now both suggest that the bolide impact predates the mass-extinction by about 100-150 kyrs.
The circumfrence of the earth is ~40,000km, being 10,000km off implies being a quater of the world away. I can't see that looking at the map provided by mbone. The map divides the earth into 12 longitude sections with the rough location of the impact crater and the Indian land mass being seperated by 6 longitude sections. Similarly the impact site and the location of the Indian land mass are roughly symmetric about the equator.
The crater is about 300 miles wide. It was found by looking at differences in density that show up in gravity measurements taken with NASA's GRACE satellites. Researchers spotted a mass concentration, which they call a mascon-dense stuff that welled up from the mantle, likely in an impact.
So Frese and colleagues overlaid data from airborne radar images that showed a 300-mile wide sub-surface, circular ridge. The mascon fit neatly inside the circle.
Far from definite but the evidence is far stronger than you are making out.
Slashdot Mirror
Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.
A filter is only useful though if it removes the bad applicants and leaves the good applicants. Filtering by language (/framework) although common is also a very good way to exclude a significant amount of programming talent on the basis that you don't want to give them a few weeks to get productive in your pet language/framework. I've never interviewed (or applied) at either but both Google and Apple seem to have more farsighted hiring practices than that.
You're wrong on two points.
One, he was given the maximum sentence available for the crimes he was charged with. In his sentencing hearing murder for hire was brought up by the prosecution, just as his supposedly good character was brought up by his parents. Both parties can say whatever they want in a sentencing hearing, as long as the judge sentences within the guidelines for the crime the criminal has been found guilty it is not an issue.
Two, he has been charged, separately with murder for hire. The case is in progress. If found guilty, he will be sentenced separately within the guidelines for that crime.
Men are better negotiators than women? Since when? Sounds more like sticking some makeup on a decision to hardball candidates. Her original lawsuit ended up being pretty merit-less as well. She couldn't even win her unfair dismissal claim.
Objective-C is an ugly, clunky language, and the only reason Apple uses it is to intentionally make your code incompatible with other platforms.
I'm not a particular fan of Objective-C either but this is just wrong. Apple inherited Objective-C when they bought NextStep and used it as the foundation of OS X. OS-X got its start in life as a partial rewrite of the NS shell and the addition of some compatibility layers (Classic Mac OS, Java, .etc.) to make up for the lack of applications. At this stage, there would have to be really really major benefits to a rewrite to justify the direct cost, not to mention the opportunity cost.
Something's definitely up if they're getting valued at $40 billion! That's 4 times the UK's annual agricultural output!
Interesting point. I dont't think that your statistics on farming in the UK are correct though. The total output of the UK agricultural industry in 2013 was 25,902 million pounds (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/379757/agriaccounts-tiffstatsnotice-27nov14.pdf) or at current exchange rates approximately $40 billion. The statistic you are using, I imagine, is the value added income (total ouput - inputs).
Uber is worth about one year of agriculture produce from the UK. Still seems like a very speculative valuation..
Because its requirements, chosen by its designer, were misguided and impossible to achieve with a clean, elegant design.
I don't think a clean, elegant design was ever the goal. It was built as a practical set of design compromises to fill the needs of the industry at the time.
The ugly compromise approach set back OO programming momentum, cost millions of person-years of unnecessary debugging effort and allowed many, many continued buffer overflow exploits etc. that ruin the reputation of software in general.
I think it is worth pointing out that there are plenty of languages that took the non-compromising approach and have fallen into obscurity while C++ took off. In the end it was the compromises of C++ that the software industry as a whole actually wanted. C++ for a long time has provided tools such as std::string and std::vector, to mitigate/eliminate the risk of buffer overflow vulnerabilities. The C string functions are terribly designed, but programmers wanted to and chose to continue to use them, that's not the fault of C++.
Personally I'll take the productivity and maintainability of Java/C# over C++ if I can. When I can't though, C++ isn't a bad option. It certainly has its pitfalls/complexity. Some were bad design choices (e.g. exceptions can throw any type). Some were unavoidable (e.g. the interplay of virtual functions/inheritance with in place allocation). Some are technical debt.
A safety systems programming language sounds great but they had to ruin it by putting a garbage collector in it. This makes it useless for systems programming.
No they didn't: http://doc.rust-lang.org/compl...
So 17.5 million men should have the same last name as him, if he had one.
Presumably the women he raped, who then bore sons for him didn't take on his last name. (That is if he had a last name)
Maybe someone else can do the math
I fitted a simple exponential curve. Assuming 800 years have passed, and one new generation is formed every 20 years we get the range t : [0,40]. Assuming for f(t): f(0) = 1 and f(40) = 17.5m, I get f(t) = e^(0.181076t). This means the ratio of f(t+1):f(t) is ~1.5, so each generation would have to leave about 1.5 male descendants.
I'm surprised that .Net doesn't have more popularity in other countries. It has full Unicode support for strings and identifiers.
I'm confused to what you mean by .Net not having more popularity in other countries. Do you mean, you expect that it would enjoy (even) greater popularity levels than it does in English speaking countries?
The simple answer to that is there are more important factors (fitness for task at hand .etc.) in influencing language choice. Where I am (Japan) .Net and Java have plenty of popularity, although nobody writes identifier names in non-ASCII characters. Conversly, desktop Linux which has rather poor Japanese support (Buggy, sub-standard input methods, poor translations, and painful font support) seems (I have no statistics) to have less popularity.
Most of us call that hard to learn.
Learning a language is a multi-year undertaking full stop (unless you already speak a closely related language) and novels are generally the most difficult reading materials. Even learning German or French, I expect it would take several years of study to reach the point where I could read a novel.
I think what you mentioned about alternate Japanese readings explains why I've heard Japanese write out or otherwise indicate which kanji are used in their name when meeting someone.
I imagine the Chinese and Koreans do that as well. The characters used to write names are part of people's identity and generally carefully selected by parents. There can be literally hundreds of different ways to write the same name in Japanese. 'Kazuo' is a good example. The name itself simply means first born (son) but there are many different choices of characters to represent it, with the characters for either 'one' or 'harmony' (wa) being common choices to write 'kazu'
The pragmatic side of me sometimes wishes everyone simply spoke a common language, but the artistic side of my brain would certainly lament the loss of so much culture that a multitude of languages represents. Hanzi/kanji characters are quite beautiful as an art form, even if I don't know the meaning of them.
I couldn't agree more. Language and orthography are fascinating topics, intrinsically linked with culture.
Yeah sure, it's not an iron rule. I could name plenty of exceptions as well, but its pretty damn consistent. Most of the exceptions are words formed by combining Japanese words, or using kanji for their phonetic value (e.g. country names) rather than words formed from Chinese character roots.
Chinese characters aren't that hard to learn. I learnt them (a subset anyway) while learning Japanese. It took about 3 years of reasonably intense study to be able to pick up and read a novel without too much difficulty. After 2 years I could generally approach newspaper articles. Newspapers are generally one of the easiest written mediums to approach. While there are several thousand characters in use, there is a relatively small subset of frequently used characters. Additional most characters are formed in a regular fashion from simpler characters. Probably the most common form being one phonetic part to indicate the reading and one semantic part to indicate the meaning.
Chinese (apparently) has more characters in common use than Japanese but the difficulty does not scale linearly with the number of characters and Japanese adds the significant complication of having phonetic (Chinese derived) readings and often multiple, irregular native Japanese readings per character, and huge numbers of irregular readings for combinations of characters.
One interesting side affect of characters having semantic meaning is that it often makes the meaning of words even new to the reader, immediately obvious. Especially for science and technology related vocabulary the meanings of words rendered in Chinese characters is often much clearer and more immediately obvious than that of English words derived from Latin/Greek. As an extreme example I can often comprehend Chinese (esp. when written in traditional characters) even though I do not speak Chinese
The equator runs through Indonesia. Most poor countries (and most countries full stop) are north of the equator.
Maybe I'm missing the joke but how did Newton do that in the 17th century?
One interesting piece of history about this project is that they switched from using C/GTK to using C++/QT recently and apparently with very good results. Especially interesting given the way Linus' past comments on C++ have been so widely replayed.
here's a link to the talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Your reply is also somewhat confusing to me. I don't think you've actually looked into the issue. .NET popularity has gone downhill as more developers want to use more dynamic and developer-oriented solutions which are almost invariably open source. This is an actual trend; a real statistic, and essentially the reason why MS went ahead and open sourced .NET.
If it is a real trend and a real statistic then please link to some reference for this. I'm interested to see. Maybe I'm not very good at Google searches but I cannot find any reliable statistics to support this.
As for C and .NET you can use .NET quite easily with C. Even if your project is strictly in C#, if you know C I doubt you'd have much trouble with C# (other than maybe getting the hang of good-practices?).
I code mostly in C++ and C# and have no trouble at all with C#. It's one of my favourite languages. My post however was not about myself, I was paraphrasing the original question, as perhaps I've missed something but the statement "why you are asking for citation when the whole discussion is sort of based on this issue" is completely at odds with how I read the original question - i.e. (very much paraphrasing here) 'Should I learn C# it seems to be the way forward'
Though even if your interpretation of the original question is correct, it would still not seem unreasonable to ask for a reference to support the statement that .NET is losing popularity. The only evidence of this "fact" I can see on this thread is mis-matched anecdotes, hence my reply to your post.
Replying to myself but I also think ref/out parameters are worth mention :)
Why? A sincere question, not a snark. Is it multi-programing-language support? The Microsoft IDE (VS?) What is it that wins over the Java ecosystem?
I'm not the OP but while Java is not a bad programming language at all, in my opinion C# is much nicer. It is pretty much Java but with more features and candy. Java has finally caught up with a few of the big ones - e.g. lambdas, try-resource to match C#'s using blocks, the streaming API to kind of capture part of LINQ's functionality and default methods to kind of match extension methods as a way to do mixins.
It's still lacks a lot of features though - e.g. generics with support for unboxed types and runtime type checking, unsigned types, stack allocated arrays/structs, support for unsafe code and pointers, coroutines, type inference on variable declerations, properties and property initializer syntax, operator overloading, language level support for async programming constructs, nullable types and the '??' operator, dynamic types, .etc. C# 6 will also be adding the '.?' to allow propagation of null through chained methods
In addition to this I feel like the core .NET libraries have generally benefited from the hindsite of seeing where Java went wrong / could be improved on.
Yeah, this is a big one, and it's especially painful when working with programmers who are less competent. If you are writing it yourself, you can just wrap everything in try{}catch{}, which is what I do, but you never no what method is going to throw an exception.
Agreed about the docs. MSDN documentation in general is horrendous. It lacks critical information and is generally written in a completly impenetrable way. They also rely on crappy machine translation for non-English languages, ugh.
There is one good reason for avoiding checked exceptions though. Interfaces. In Java it is required that either 1. all exceptions that might ever be thrown by implementations of an interface be declared at the interface decleration or 2. all exceptions be bundled in RuntimeExceptions to short circuit the checked exception mechanism anyway (with the potential side effect of ruining stack traces).
As far as catching exceptions go, imo unless you are going to do something specific to deal with an exception, then catching it is bad coding practice. E.g. Catching a SocketException to implement retry logic - sure go for it. Catching an exception to log it and rethrow (or worse throw your own custom exception and ruin the stack trace) - do this as high up the call stack as possible.
Uhh... .NET usage has been falling for many years now, that's why they made it open source to try and recover from that trend. I'm confused as to why you are asking for citation when the whole discussion is sort of based on this issue. Also note that headhunters looking for .NET devs could be the result of devs *leaving* .NET causing a lack of hands and thusly an increased need.
As far as I can see the premise of the original question is that 'my employees like .NET but I'm happy in C and about to retire, should I bother learning it'? Nothing about that implies that .NET is fading. In fact it seems to imply the exact opposite to me. In the hypothetical situation that it did imply that .NET is fading though, that still wouldn't make it a fact. Is there actual evidence that .NET is failing? All I can see on this Slashdot thread is mis-matched anecdotes.
Which is probably more important than anything else. The benefit of open sourcing .net core is that mono will get better. So if you have a lot of existing .net code and want to get away from ms licensing, at least ms will keep the dev tool revenue.
From (mostly indirect) experience, maybe it does for CRUD apps. For complicated applications though you might get ~30% code sharing and a lot of pain.
I've never found the antipodal argument convincing. Seismic waves converge at the antipode of an impact only if the target is spherically symmetric and isotropic. In the actual Earth, you have reflections off all kinds of laterally varying boundaries. Also, the sound speed differs substantially between continental and oceanic crust, so the path matters quite a bit. The Chixulub impact is also not that big (as planetary-scale impacts go). The projectile was what, 10 km? Shock heating is only significant within a few times the projectile diameter.
I'm not a geophysicist but I do write software for the field so so I do have some limited knowledge of it. With the disclaimer out of the way, forgive me if I am wrong but:
1. Would anistropy mater much in this situation? I know it matters a lot in seismic tomography but the magnitude of the waves here is, well, of a completly different order of magnitude (excuse the pun). Would the physics creating angle dependent and/or horizontal velocity variations in the crust still hold up? Would they mater much on this scale? Presumably the waves are spending most of the time traveling through the mantle.
2. Similarly is being exactly spherically symmetric that important? Are the other stellar bodies were the antipodal phenomenon has been observed exactly spherically symmetric?
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation35.html provides a reasonably good summary of the pro-antipodal argument. Even if the waves are not focusing on an exact point with equally timed first-arrivals you could still reasonably expect see something resembling antipodal effects.
Only if you think that being off by about 10,000 km is "reasonably good". What kills the "killer" asteroid hypothesis is that the bulk of the biogeostratigraphic and high-resolution geochronological evidence now both suggest that the bolide impact predates the mass-extinction by about 100-150 kyrs.
The circumfrence of the earth is ~40,000km, being 10,000km off implies being a quater of the world away. I can't see that looking at the map provided by mbone. The map divides the earth into 12 longitude sections with the rough location of the impact crater and the Indian land mass being seperated by 6 longitude sections. Similarly the impact site and the location of the Indian land mass are roughly symmetric about the equator.
From the link:
The crater is about 300 miles wide. It was found by looking at differences in density that show up in gravity measurements taken with NASA's GRACE satellites. Researchers spotted a mass concentration, which they call a mascon-dense stuff that welled up from the mantle, likely in an impact.
So Frese and colleagues overlaid data from airborne radar images that showed a 300-mile wide sub-surface, circular ridge. The mascon fit neatly inside the circle.
Far from definite but the evidence is far stronger than you are making out.