Agree. Programmers tend to exaggerate the flaws of languages, but any grown up will note that Javascript runs on everything big enough to have a browser. Like all languages you can write badly or well. Even if you don't go all the way with Douglas Crawford (I don't), it's easy enough to avoid really bad things - and its maths handling is excellent for the intended application space. So the DOM sucks? Plenty of protocols suck, but we don't blame the language that has to work with them.
Assuming his blogspot post isn't just a honeypot troll, his view of engineering seems to be that you shouldn't have to know anything to do it. Just plug lego together - in other words his idea is that some else - who? - should do all the hard stuff so he can assemble it like toy bricks and get the credit. Let's call the someone else a programmer. He's worse than a PHB, he's - drumroll - an MBA.
The post was intended as a kind of joke, and clearly some people didn't get that. But it isn't entirely a non sequitur. People who are unable to realise the difference between science and fiction are also less likely to know about the way the Internet works and, in my experience, likely to be taken in by cheap website design companies. If they really practised ethical business they would make a proper study of everything they did and get good advice. But their careless approach to the truth about the world spills over into other things.
When you have seen (as I have) an Evangelical wrap a van round a lamppost because he believed God would show him how to drive it properly, you may appreciate my point.
An Englishman, an American and an Israeli are discussing the cost of living in their countries. The Englishman says "I earn $50000 a year and it costs me $50000 to live, so I'm doing OK". The American says "I earn $100000 a year and the cost of living is $50000." The Englishman says "What do you do with the other $50000?" The American says "It's a free country, I can do what I like."
The Israeli says "Well, my income is $10000 a year and the cost of living is $50000 a year". The American says "How does that work?" The Israeli says "It's a free country, I can do what I like."
Is this flamebait? Anyway, yes, as a (not very good perhaps) Quaker, with our testimony to ethical business, I have to observe that people who want pictures of naked people having sex go to porn sites where they presumably get exactly that. Most of the religious websites I have (usually accidentally) visited make extremely dubious and unprovable claims which, for any other subject, would in this country be regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority. So it doesn't surprise me that the operators of those religious websites are more likely to find themselves hosting malicious material; in some cases the entire website is clearly malicious in intent, since it attempts to persuade people of things for which a great deal of evidence exists that they are untrue.
The actual shape is much more complicated than even a cone since Venus is moving in orbit. If you expect me to come up with the equation of a shape like that in a three minute post rather than use the very approximate term "cylinder", either you're being unrealistic or you have me confused with Johann von Neumann.
When I order stuff from the builder's yard, they do this thing called "deliver" in which the stuff miraculously turns up at your address and gets placed right where you want it by a thing called a "crane". It works so well I don't even have to visit the yard in person most times.
Perhaps you don't have this in the US and that's why you need trucks all the time (sarcasm).
The event (visible transit of Venus) is happening at his location. Except within a cylinder the diameter of the Sun and projected from it in the direction of Venus, nothing of interest is occurring at all.
Looked at from an overall point of view, this cylinder exists all the time since the Venus-Sun axis is always there, and is only of interest when the Earth intersects it and we see a transit. So, from a time point of view, the event is happening at the Earth, neither Venus nor the Sun.
Software is worth what it costs. Otherwise, Government procurement policies would be called into doubt.
You are right: there are no essential features lacked by Open or Libre Office. By essential, I mean stuff needed to present information. Therefore, Government departments could easily mandate that only that feature set is used. But the Microsoft argument is that if "free" means it only does 99% of what expensive does, free is worthless (even if the 1% is unnecessary.)
Take presentations. Almost all presentations would be precisely as meaningful if the slides were done in Wordpad with additional images. But, like medieval scribes, Microsoft has persuaded people that unless every page is an illuminated manuscript, the content is worthless. The arms race in manuscript production continued right up until Gutenberg, when people suddenly realised that movable type was easier to read. I await the day when some unknown 5-star general suddenly realises that Powerpoint is a waste of resources, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
I spent all day in a meeting in which I did all my necessary stuff with a BB phone and a bridged PlayBook. I am not a corporate drone; I'm a small company person who has to stay in contact with a number of people, watch my servers, and attempt to capture a load of customer requirements before I get back to the office and start redesigning the architecture and doling out the jobs. With a phone and an unobtrusive tablet I can do all of that without having the wall of a laptop screen in front of me. without needing a power socket. Since Nokia abandoned Maemo/Meego, BB is the only company that meets my needs in a well integrated way.
The PB is not a disaster; it is the most business-friendly tablet out. That might change if Samsung does a really good job on ICS for the Note, but at this point they are behind RIM, even though they are ahead on consumer tablets.
One key thing for Blackberry is that, if they go for a touchscreen keyboard, they must do it better than anybody else (or I will stay on my 9810 till it dies...) My belief, having seen the report, is that they get this. Six months ago I too had written them off. Now, I'm not nearly so sure.
I'm glad someone else knows about it. Did you ever hear the story about Mountbatten (who was always keen on new naval technology) firing a revolver at a lump of it and nearly killing a few people? A pity they never got the chance to try it- just imagine the reaction of a U-Boot captain trying to torpedo an iceberg - which then fired right back.
I very much doubt that more than a small number of the people killed in the Middle East wars of the first decade of the 21st century were anti-American. It is this kind of demonisation of "the other" that is the pretext for wars.
The people in the towers weren't guilty of anything either.
Dust on an old man's sleeve
Is all the dust burnt roses leave
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended
And rotates on its axis once a day? That's what "literal days as experienced by the universe" would mean. That's even sillier than Young Earth Creationism, which is even sillier than... something very silly indeed.
Assuming you're not a troll, I can assure you that here in South-Western England the three trees we have had come down over the years have all been blown down at night. And I've been in some pretty strong winds at night in New England, the Mid-West and the Gulf of Mexico. So where are these "every place I've ever lived"?
The whole taking the six days literally thing is a Protestant error. It's what you get when a lot of very literally minded people, such as Bishop Usher, collide with a metaphor. Even Newton fell for it, trying to work out the date of the Creation from the Bible and starting with Christmas falling on 25th December, 1AD. As Jay Gould used to call it, it is a failure to distinguish "non-overlapping magisteria", i.e. astronomy and geology on the one hand do not intersect with a poetic exploration of history and society on the other.
The funny thing is that this literalism is very recent. As per my sig, quoting Tennyson, educated Victorians were already familiar with an enormously expanded timescale and the idea of replacement of species (he was writing in 1844, before Darwin published). And at school we used to sing that Victorian hymn which included the words "A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone" - English protestants had no trouble at all with the idea that the "days" of Genesis were metaphorical
Whether the original writers thought that, of course, is moot. But who did you believe in the early 1800s - a nomadic goat herder or the clever young men at Cambridge who were making such exciting discoveries? And why do apparently educated Americans claim to believe something that was shown to be false over 200 years ago?
Please go and learn some actual British history, including the history of technology, before posting any more of your Cato Institute bunkum. Were you to do so, you would discover that the early technical lead of the British, due largely to non-university educated Dissenting craftsmen, was lost later in the 19th century because of a failure to make practical use of the theoretical work done in the universities. By the start of WW1, Germany had better explosives, better shells, better rangefinding and aiming equipment, better artillery, and arguably better logistics. "Better navigation and better gun aiming tools" for the British armed forces would have been a bloody good start towards ending WW1 in 1916 when a reasonable peace was still possible.
I think I'll take my chances with Government and taxes versus Libertarians and giant corporations, thank you. I can at least vote for Governments and pay an accountant to ensure I don't pay too much tax. But in your world, where the price of food and oil is set by whoever can buy up all of it and dole it out at will, I don't have a vote.
A lot happened in the first part of the Victorian era in the UK - I am referencing the UK because (a) that's where Babbage was and (b) I know a little of the history. This was a period when blacksmith engineering was rapidly giving way to scientific engineering. In essence, just as now with silicon, engineering techniques were developing fast as a response to new requirements for precision and metallurgy. So "the technology of the time" would itself have been different if the Government of the day had grasped just what it had, and made a real push for it. I would go out on a limb and suggest that if Prince Albert hadn't died when he did, the Analytical Engine would probably have been built. He was a major proponent of technical development and ruffled a lot of Establishment (classically educated) figures, but his Great Exhibition was a huge success. He died in 1861, in his early 40s. Babbage in 1871.
Florida seems to be one of those places in the world, like parts of London,UK, where killing black people isn't murder if the police don't think it is.
However, I think the GP's "rigorous test" can possibly be summarised as:
1. Are you white?
2. Or, if you're a bit non-white, are you related to a lawyer?
3. Or, if you're very non-white, are you a very rich rap artiste?
Generals command armies, and the examples of history - Julius Caesar, the Greek Junta, the Chilean Junta, to name but three - and the Burmese and Pakistani governments of today all go to show why civilised States try to keep armies out of politics. Breivik in Norway acted unilaterally with the idea that he would change the Government of Norway, and the only argument is whether he's going to spend the rest of his life in a prison or a psychiatric prison. Your comment is a complete straw man argument that is easily refuted by obvious examples.
I was once told of a NATO meeting where an American general looked round at his audience and said, in effect "I expect you all realise that if there was major civil unrest in your countries you would have to take over the Government." A British officer got up and said "Actually, old boy, we don't "realise" any such thing and if you continue talking like this we will all walk out".
In fact this particle is pretty massive already, as TFA notes (around the mass of a lithium atom). So presumably a Xi_b^obelix would mass as much as a menhir.
"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set - then at least I'll own something that has always worked." (Hermann Goering, 1943)
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Agree. Programmers tend to exaggerate the flaws of languages, but any grown up will note that Javascript runs on everything big enough to have a browser. Like all languages you can write badly or well. Even if you don't go all the way with Douglas Crawford (I don't), it's easy enough to avoid really bad things - and its maths handling is excellent for the intended application space. So the DOM sucks? Plenty of protocols suck, but we don't blame the language that has to work with them.
Assuming his blogspot post isn't just a honeypot troll, his view of engineering seems to be that you shouldn't have to know anything to do it. Just plug lego together - in other words his idea is that some else - who? - should do all the hard stuff so he can assemble it like toy bricks and get the credit. Let's call the someone else a programmer. He's worse than a PHB, he's - drumroll - an MBA.
When you have seen (as I have) an Evangelical wrap a van round a lamppost because he believed God would show him how to drive it properly, you may appreciate my point.
It has been independent since 1981. Which coincidentally was the year it started to degenerate.
An Englishman, an American and an Israeli are discussing the cost of living in their countries. The Englishman says "I earn $50000 a year and it costs me $50000 to live, so I'm doing OK". The American says "I earn $100000 a year and the cost of living is $50000." The Englishman says "What do you do with the other $50000?" The American says "It's a free country, I can do what I like."
The Israeli says "Well, my income is $10000 a year and the cost of living is $50000 a year". The American says "How does that work?" The Israeli says "It's a free country, I can do what I like."
Is this flamebait? Anyway, yes, as a (not very good perhaps) Quaker, with our testimony to ethical business, I have to observe that people who want pictures of naked people having sex go to porn sites where they presumably get exactly that. Most of the religious websites I have (usually accidentally) visited make extremely dubious and unprovable claims which, for any other subject, would in this country be regulated by the Advertising Standards Authority. So it doesn't surprise me that the operators of those religious websites are more likely to find themselves hosting malicious material; in some cases the entire website is clearly malicious in intent, since it attempts to persuade people of things for which a great deal of evidence exists that they are untrue.
The actual shape is much more complicated than even a cone since Venus is moving in orbit. If you expect me to come up with the equation of a shape like that in a three minute post rather than use the very approximate term "cylinder", either you're being unrealistic or you have me confused with Johann von Neumann.
Perhaps you don't have this in the US and that's why you need trucks all the time (sarcasm).
Looked at from an overall point of view, this cylinder exists all the time since the Venus-Sun axis is always there, and is only of interest when the Earth intersects it and we see a transit. So, from a time point of view, the event is happening at the Earth, neither Venus nor the Sun.
C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.
(Racine, Phèdre)
Yup, misled by an Enlightenment poet, he was expecting multiple orgasms.
You are right: there are no essential features lacked by Open or Libre Office. By essential, I mean stuff needed to present information. Therefore, Government departments could easily mandate that only that feature set is used. But the Microsoft argument is that if "free" means it only does 99% of what expensive does, free is worthless (even if the 1% is unnecessary.)
Take presentations. Almost all presentations would be precisely as meaningful if the slides were done in Wordpad with additional images. But, like medieval scribes, Microsoft has persuaded people that unless every page is an illuminated manuscript, the content is worthless. The arms race in manuscript production continued right up until Gutenberg, when people suddenly realised that movable type was easier to read. I await the day when some unknown 5-star general suddenly realises that Powerpoint is a waste of resources, though I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
The PB is not a disaster; it is the most business-friendly tablet out. That might change if Samsung does a really good job on ICS for the Note, but at this point they are behind RIM, even though they are ahead on consumer tablets.
One key thing for Blackberry is that, if they go for a touchscreen keyboard, they must do it better than anybody else (or I will stay on my 9810 till it dies...) My belief, having seen the report, is that they get this. Six months ago I too had written them off. Now, I'm not nearly so sure.
I'm glad someone else knows about it. Did you ever hear the story about Mountbatten (who was always keen on new naval technology) firing a revolver at a lump of it and nearly killing a few people? A pity they never got the chance to try it- just imagine the reaction of a U-Boot captain trying to torpedo an iceberg - which then fired right back.
Genesis (Bereshit) defines one day as an evening (sunset to sunrise) and a morning (sunrise to sunset). We are referencing Genesis. Idiot....
The people in the towers weren't guilty of anything either.
Dust on an old man's sleeve
Is all the dust burnt roses leave
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended
T S Eliot, Four Quartets.
And rotates on its axis once a day? That's what "literal days as experienced by the universe" would mean. That's even sillier than Young Earth Creationism, which is even sillier than ... something very silly indeed.
Assuming you're not a troll, I can assure you that here in South-Western England the three trees we have had come down over the years have all been blown down at night. And I've been in some pretty strong winds at night in New England, the Mid-West and the Gulf of Mexico. So where are these "every place I've ever lived"?
The funny thing is that this literalism is very recent. As per my sig, quoting Tennyson, educated Victorians were already familiar with an enormously expanded timescale and the idea of replacement of species (he was writing in 1844, before Darwin published). And at school we used to sing that Victorian hymn which included the words "A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone" - English protestants had no trouble at all with the idea that the "days" of Genesis were metaphorical
Whether the original writers thought that, of course, is moot. But who did you believe in the early 1800s - a nomadic goat herder or the clever young men at Cambridge who were making such exciting discoveries? And why do apparently educated Americans claim to believe something that was shown to be false over 200 years ago?
Actually, it should still use the even older Baudot/Murray code, in which /. is 11101 11100. So its /. uid would be 956.
I think I'll take my chances with Government and taxes versus Libertarians and giant corporations, thank you. I can at least vote for Governments and pay an accountant to ensure I don't pay too much tax. But in your world, where the price of food and oil is set by whoever can buy up all of it and dole it out at will, I don't have a vote.
A lot happened in the first part of the Victorian era in the UK - I am referencing the UK because (a) that's where Babbage was and (b) I know a little of the history. This was a period when blacksmith engineering was rapidly giving way to scientific engineering. In essence, just as now with silicon, engineering techniques were developing fast as a response to new requirements for precision and metallurgy. So "the technology of the time" would itself have been different if the Government of the day had grasped just what it had, and made a real push for it. I would go out on a limb and suggest that if Prince Albert hadn't died when he did, the Analytical Engine would probably have been built. He was a major proponent of technical development and ruffled a lot of Establishment (classically educated) figures, but his Great Exhibition was a huge success. He died in 1861, in his early 40s. Babbage in 1871.
However, I think the GP's "rigorous test" can possibly be summarised as:
I was once told of a NATO meeting where an American general looked round at his audience and said, in effect "I expect you all realise that if there was major civil unrest in your countries you would have to take over the Government." A British officer got up and said "Actually, old boy, we don't "realise" any such thing and if you continue talking like this we will all walk out".
In fact this particle is pretty massive already, as TFA notes (around the mass of a lithium atom). So presumably a Xi_b^obelix would mass as much as a menhir.
"In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set - then at least I'll own something that has always worked." (Hermann Goering, 1943)