Re:Ireland *has* changed to the Euro
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
No, the British Isles is a geographical, not a political entity. It refers to a group of islands off the Northern coast of France. There are two independent political entities on these islands:
- The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands
- Eire
The first of these, often shortened to United Kingdom or UK has several dependancies around the World which are the remnants of its once enormous empire. None of these dependancies are part of the British Isles except the Isle of Man. NB the Channel Islands are also not part of the British Isles. Don't ask me why they are in th UK and the Isle of Man isn't, it's probably some historical quirk.
Re:Ireland *has* changed to the Euro
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Don't be stupid. Euro-Asia is an island archipelago off the South coast of England. As evidence, I offer the newspaper headline that once appeared (in the Times I think) "Fog in Channel, continent cut off".
Re:Ireland *has* changed to the Euro
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Things have moved on a bit since Cromwell's time.
There was plenty of violence involved in Ireland's struggle for independence and if you think of the problems in Northern Ireland, there is still plenty of violence going on. You don't think the IRA limited their activities to peaceful demonstrations in the streets do you?
Re:Ireland *has* changed to the Euro
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Scotland wasn't taken by the Normans, at least not permanently. The current political union came in to being when Elizabeth I died and the English crown went to her nearest surviving relative who was James VI of Scotland.
Wales was also an independent country for some time after the Normans took England, and Ireland was too.
That was my main criticism of the guy's article. Case insensitive (but preserve case) is the correct way to do it. If a human being sees my name written down: jeremyp, JeremyP, Jeremyp, JEREMYP, they see a reference to the same object.
Unix, IMHO, is wrong on this score, the reason being (I have heard) is that when it was written, ther kernel had to fit into a tiny address space (64K being the maximum address space for the PDP11, one of it's most common early platforms). Not having the code for case insensitive comparisons on the file system was a significant saving of space.
Most Windows games use direct X to interface to the hardware. This is not (AFAIK) available for the Mac, so worrying about where the mouse is when doing a port is probably the least of your problems.
Anyway, why do most Windows games need to move the mouse about? Sure, they may need to hide it.
Put everything in quotes? How do you do a quote with the mouse? If I want to listen to an mp3 on my Mac I just double click it with the mouse. I don't have to *type* anything.
I'll admit that quite often I do like to do things from a shell, but even then bash's autocomplete feature puts in backslashes before all the spaces. With current interface tools, spaces give very few problems so why care about them one way or the other?
I bought my powerbook without a one button mouse. It has a one button trackpad included and I already had a M$ optical USB mouse. Even so, when working in Aqua I hardly notice the trackpad's lack of multiple buttons. This is prabably a result of good interface design.
Unfortunately, it completely screws copy and paste in my X server.
A good manager who knows about programming would hire him. The problem is they don't exist (or are very rare).
One of the reasons for my irrational hatred of all things java is that a lot of people involved with it seem to think that java is a skill. It's not, it's knowledge. In my last company, we did a lot of programming with C and C++ and various technologies such as RPC, Corba, COM etc etc. and yet at least two people resigned because they couldn't put the magic j word on their resume. Careerwise at the time (pre dot bomb) they were right. You could have 10 years of C coding experience, a signed certificate from Donald Knuth that you were the top programmer of all time and you still couldn't get a job in a.com startup because you didn't know java yet.
vi is the only remotely usable text editor that is guaranteed to be available on any Unix box. It's the lingua franca of Unix text editing.
vi is a bit bizarre for anybody coming from a graphical environment, but once you get used to it, it is as efficient and powerful as any other text editor with the exception of emacs, but life's too short to learn the bits that emacs does that vi doesn't.
No coding is a craft or maybe engineering, not an art. An artists's objective is to produce something that has an aesthetic quality. An engineer's or craftsman's objective is to produce something that performs a function. "Aesthetically pleasing" is secondary. e.g. the function of a bridge is to get people or things across a river without them getting their feet wet. It's no good designing a roadbridge which looks beautiful but collapses when the first car crosses it.
Windows 2000 came out which was really the next major upgrade to Windows NT. Most commercial software companies stop releasing patches to older versions of software when a brand spanking new one comes out. It's a fact of commercial life. a) you need to redirect the resources that were maintaining version 1 to maintaining version 2 and b) you want people to stop using version 1 and *buy* version 2.
Microsoft had a near monopoly in the BASIC interpreter market because there weren't really any alternatives. If we look right back to the beginning, it was Paul Allen and Bill Gates who wrote the *first* BASIC interpreter for a microcomputer. So you could say they were technical innovators in those days.
I thought the reasons why MS-DOS got its momopoly position were well known. Basically, IBM were going to license CPM/86 for their new computer, but the guy who ran Digital Research was out playing with his aeroplane when IBM went to see him and nobody else was prepared to sign the NDA. When IBM went to see Bill Gates, however, he was prepared to take them seriously and sold them an operating system he didn't have at the time. The rest is history.
Everybody complains about M$ and how they use dirty tricks and their monopoly situation to stamp on the opposition, but they fail to ask the question: why have they got the ability to do that? It's because their competitors all made bad business decisions.
Some examples:
Apple lost the opportunity to dominate the desktop in the mid '80s because they refused to license their operating system without an actual Macintosh which was perceived as a very expensive desktop system.
Word Perfect lost its dominance of the PC word processor market because it failed to realise that Windows was the future for PCs.
Lotus lost its position of dominance in the spreadsheet market because Lotus failed to perceive the importance of Win32. Although it has to be said that this only accelerated the inevitable because by then M$ dominated the word processing market and for only a bit more money you could buy Word with an adequate spreadsheet and presentation graphics package which all integrated together nicely.
I remember when I was a child back in the late '70s / early '80s seeing a report on television which alleged even then that the NSA had deliberately crippled DES by restricting the key length. So even then, people did not consider DES to be as secure as it could or should be.
DNA is not good for massively parallel processing because it doesn't do anything on its own. It just sits there. What it isn't bad for is storing information For that you need machines for extracting the information into something useful e.g. every living cell is full of machines who's purpose is to make proteins from the information in the DNA including the proteins in the machines that do the extracting and the proteins in the machines that make copies of the DNA.
DNA has some disadvantages as a mass storage mechanism e.g. it only has to get a bit hot in order to break down and the copying process is prone to error.
Lets say that you are calculating something which has an answer of either "yes" or "no" and your computer has a 99.8% chance of getting the answer right. If I run the program once, I'll get an answer which is probably right (99.8% probably right). If I run the computer 10 times, I'll get a quantity of right answers and a quantity of wrong answers. Let's say I decide I'll take the majority decision (I'm stuck if I get 5 of each, but the numbers are easier to calculate than for 11 or 9). What is the probability of getting 5 or more wrong answers? The answer I get is about 0.000000005% which is a lot smaller than 0.2%
This is worked out as follows:
The probablility of getting 10 wrong answers is:
0.002^10
The probability of getting 9 wrong answers is
0.002^9 *.998 * 10 (10 ways of getting 1 right and 9 wrong)
It was the Science Museum, not the British museum. What they built was a complete Difference Engine, not the Analytical Engine.
100,000 pounds weight might not be far wrong as the Analytical engine, if built, would have been a little bit too large for a standard PC mini-tower case. It would have needed a steam engine for power if it had been built in the Victorian era.
The source for all these facts is the Science Museum web-site (http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/)
They are both right in a way. Any global map coordinate system depends on a reference elipsoid (aka squashed sphere) that approximates the Earth's surface and a reference meridian which determines where zero longitude is on the elipsoid. This is known as a "datum". The one used by GPS is known as WGS84. The WGS84 elipsoid is defined in such a way that the average movement of the Earth's surface due to plate tectonics is zero wrt the coordinate system.
Maps in the UK traditionally use a datum set up by the Ordnance Survey (known as OSGB36) which uses a different elipsoid and results in a disagreement between a GPS receiver and an OS map of about 100 metres unless you change the datum used by the GPS receiver to agree with the map.
In fact due to the movement of the Earth's crust, the whole of Great Britain is moving North East wrt WGS84 and so the Greenwich meridian is actually getting further away from the meridian as shown on a GPS receiver.
Newton said "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Taken out of context it seems like a noble thing to say, but it was actually intended as an insult to Robert Hooke his contemporary and hated rival, who was very short and by all accounts sensitive about the fact.
I feel qualified to answer this question since "none" is the response I put when filling in my census form.
Why did I answer "none"? Ultimately, I believe it is possible to explain the phenomena in the Universe without resorting to the device of a deity. If you are trying to explain the existence of complex objects like people, it is intellectually dishonest to invoke something that is more complex than the thing you are trying to explain. I believe that the Universe is ultimately explainable by simple (sort of) physical laws and the so called paranormal phenomena such as ESP, ghosts etc (if they exist - in my opinion they don't except as psychological phenomena, but I'm keeping an open mind) are explainable by laws we haven't found yet.
That doesn't mean there isn't room for a god. Perhaps one does exist in the Universe, perhaps one exists outside the Universe in a bigger reality. I just don't think one is necessary. This means I'm not an atheist, but neither do I worship a deity. Therefore I have no religion.
In what way is this a "new kind of war"? Several countries in the World, including my own (the UK) have been fighting this kind of war against terrorists for decades. Perhaps the USA can learn some lessons from other people's fights.
Firstly, it's going to be a long hard fight. The British Government's fight against the Provisional IRA lasted more than 30 years and although the British had the upper hand when the IRA declared a ceasfire, they were certainly not defeated at that point. Also, the British had home advantage. That is, the IRA's bases were in British territory or in the Republic of Ireland next door. The Republic, while in sympathy with the aims of the IRA definitely disapproved of its methods. The people in the IRA are culturally similar to the people fighting them (i.e. Western European Christian background). This makes it much easier to infiltrate their organisation.
Secondly, traditional military action has to be used very carefully if at all. Any highly publicised military action can be twisted by the terrorists to turn people merely sympathetic to their cause into new recruits.
Thirdly, intelligence is the key, agents on the ground in particular. It's all very well to have satellite surveillance, but how do you tell a suburban house containing a group of dangerous terrorists from a suburban house containing an all-American family with a satellite? Terrists use ordinary society as their cover. You have to get among them.
This is not a new kind of war. Lots of the US's friends have an idea of how it works and what it might look like and I'm sure the US government is talking to them right now.
I don't believe the American People (note capitalisation of "People") much less the CIA have ever supported the IRA. I thought the funding of the IRA from people in the US was mainly by Irish Americans with a romantic view of their ancestor country who are out of touch with the realities of Northern Ireland today.
In my memory (I'm 35) loyalist paramilitaries have always been regarded as criminals and murderers - same as the IRA. However, if you look further back at the history of Ireland there is a lot of stuff done in the name of the British Government which can be described as unpleasant at best.
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No, the British Isles is a geographical, not a political entity. It refers to a group of islands off the Northern coast of France. There are two independent political entities on these islands:
- The United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands
- Eire
The first of these, often shortened to United Kingdom or UK has several dependancies around the World which are the remnants of its once enormous empire. None of these dependancies are part of the British Isles except the Isle of Man. NB the Channel Islands are also not part of the British Isles. Don't ask me why they are in th UK and the Isle of Man isn't, it's probably some historical quirk.
Don't be stupid. Euro-Asia is an island archipelago off the South coast of England. As evidence, I offer the newspaper headline that once appeared (in the Times I think) "Fog in Channel, continent cut off".
Things have moved on a bit since Cromwell's time.
There was plenty of violence involved in Ireland's struggle for independence and if you think of the problems in Northern Ireland, there is still plenty of violence going on. You don't think the IRA limited their activities to peaceful demonstrations in the streets do you?
Scotland wasn't taken by the Normans, at least not permanently. The current political union came in to being when Elizabeth I died and the English crown went to her nearest surviving relative who was James VI of Scotland.
Wales was also an independent country for some time after the Normans took England, and Ireland was too.
That was my main criticism of the guy's article. Case insensitive (but preserve case) is the correct way to do it. If a human being sees my name written down: jeremyp, JeremyP, Jeremyp, JEREMYP, they see a reference to the same object.
Unix, IMHO, is wrong on this score, the reason being (I have heard) is that when it was written, ther kernel had to fit into a tiny address space (64K being the maximum address space for the PDP11, one of it's most common early platforms). Not having the code for case insensitive comparisons on the file system was a significant saving of space.
That's what he meant:
"Apple is equal to crap"
not crap is assigned to apple.
Most Windows games use direct X to interface to the hardware. This is not (AFAIK) available for the Mac, so worrying about where the mouse is when doing a port is probably the least of your problems.
Anyway, why do most Windows games need to move the mouse about? Sure, they may need to hide it.
Put everything in quotes? How do you do a quote with the mouse? If I want to listen to an mp3 on my Mac I just double click it with the mouse. I don't have to *type* anything.
I'll admit that quite often I do like to do things from a shell, but even then bash's autocomplete feature puts in backslashes before all the spaces. With current interface tools, spaces give very few problems so why care about them one way or the other?
I bought my powerbook without a one button mouse. It has a one button trackpad included and I already had a M$ optical USB mouse. Even so, when working in Aqua I hardly notice the trackpad's lack of multiple buttons. This is prabably a result of good interface design.
Unfortunately, it completely screws copy and paste in my X server.
A good manager who knows about programming would hire him. The problem is they don't exist (or are very rare).
.com startup because you didn't know java yet.
One of the reasons for my irrational hatred of all things java is that a lot of people involved with it seem to think that java is a skill. It's not, it's knowledge. In my last company, we did a lot of programming with C and C++ and various technologies such as RPC, Corba, COM etc etc. and yet at least two people resigned because they couldn't put the magic j word on their resume. Careerwise at the time (pre dot bomb) they were right. You could have 10 years of C coding experience, a signed certificate from Donald Knuth that you were the top programmer of all time and you still couldn't get a job in a
vi is the greatest Unix tool ever invented.
vi is the only remotely usable text editor that is guaranteed to be available on any Unix box. It's the lingua franca of Unix text editing.
vi is a bit bizarre for anybody coming from a graphical environment, but once you get used to it, it is as efficient and powerful as any other text editor with the exception of emacs, but life's too short to learn the bits that emacs does that vi doesn't.
No coding is a craft or maybe engineering, not an art. An artists's objective is to produce something that has an aesthetic quality. An engineer's or craftsman's objective is to produce something that performs a function. "Aesthetically pleasing" is secondary. e.g. the function of a bridge is to get people or things across a river without them getting their feet wet. It's no good designing a roadbridge which looks beautiful but collapses when the first car crosses it.
Windows 2000 came out which was really the next major upgrade to Windows NT. Most commercial software companies stop releasing patches to older versions of software when a brand spanking new one comes out. It's a fact of commercial life. a) you need to redirect the resources that were maintaining version 1 to maintaining version 2 and b) you want people to stop using version 1 and *buy* version 2.
Microsoft had a near monopoly in the BASIC interpreter market because there weren't really any alternatives. If we look right back to the beginning, it was Paul Allen and Bill Gates who wrote the *first* BASIC interpreter for a microcomputer. So you could say they were technical innovators in those days.
I thought the reasons why MS-DOS got its momopoly position were well known. Basically, IBM were going to license CPM/86 for their new computer, but the guy who ran Digital Research was out playing with his aeroplane when IBM went to see him and nobody else was prepared to sign the NDA. When IBM went to see Bill Gates, however, he was prepared to take them seriously and sold them an operating system he didn't have at the time. The rest is history.
Everybody complains about M$ and how they use dirty tricks and their monopoly situation to stamp on the opposition, but they fail to ask the question: why have they got the ability to do that? It's because their competitors all made bad business decisions.
Some examples:
Apple lost the opportunity to dominate the desktop in the mid '80s because they refused to license their operating system without an actual Macintosh which was perceived as a very expensive desktop system.
Word Perfect lost its dominance of the PC word processor market because it failed to realise that Windows was the future for PCs.
Lotus lost its position of dominance in the spreadsheet market because Lotus failed to perceive the importance of Win32. Although it has to be said that this only accelerated the inevitable because by then M$ dominated the word processing market and for only a bit more money you could buy Word with an adequate spreadsheet and presentation graphics package which all integrated together nicely.
I remember when I was a child back in the late '70s / early '80s seeing a report on television which alleged even then that the NSA had deliberately crippled DES by restricting the key length. So even then, people did not consider DES to be as secure as it could or should be.
DNA is not good for massively parallel processing because it doesn't do anything on its own. It just sits there. What it isn't bad for is storing information For that you need machines for extracting the information into something useful e.g. every living cell is full of machines who's purpose is to make proteins from the information in the DNA including the proteins in the machines that do the extracting and the proteins in the machines that make copies of the DNA.
DNA has some disadvantages as a mass storage mechanism e.g. it only has to get a bit hot in order to break down and the copying process is prone to error.
Rubbish!
.998 * 10 (10 ways of getting 1 right and 9 wrong)
Lets say that you are calculating something which has an answer of either "yes" or "no" and your computer has a 99.8% chance of getting the answer right. If I run the program once, I'll get an answer which is probably right (99.8% probably right). If I run the computer 10 times, I'll get a quantity of right answers and a quantity of wrong answers. Let's say I decide I'll take the majority decision (I'm stuck if I get 5 of each, but the numbers are easier to calculate than for 11 or 9). What is the probability of getting 5 or more wrong answers? The answer I get is about 0.000000005% which is a lot smaller than 0.2%
This is worked out as follows:
The probablility of getting 10 wrong answers is:
0.002^10
The probability of getting 9 wrong answers is
0.002^9 *
The probability of getting 8 wrong answers is
0.002^8 * 0.998^2 * 45 (45 ways of getting 2 right)
and so on down to:
The probability of getting 5 wrong is
0.002^5 * 0.998^5 * 1764
Maybe he did. In his list of alternatives there was no mention of Java.
It was the Science Museum, not the British museum. What they built was a complete Difference Engine, not the Analytical Engine.
100,000 pounds weight might not be far wrong as the Analytical engine, if built, would have been a little bit too large for a standard PC mini-tower case. It would have needed a steam engine for power if it had been built in the Victorian era.
The source for all these facts is the Science Museum web-site (http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/)
They are both right in a way. Any global map coordinate system depends on a reference elipsoid (aka squashed sphere) that approximates the Earth's surface and a reference meridian which determines where zero longitude is on the elipsoid. This is known as a "datum". The one used by GPS is known as WGS84. The WGS84 elipsoid is defined in such a way that the average movement of the Earth's surface due to plate tectonics is zero wrt the coordinate system.
Maps in the UK traditionally use a datum set up by the Ordnance Survey (known as OSGB36) which uses a different elipsoid and results in a disagreement between a GPS receiver and an OS map of about 100 metres unless you change the datum used by the GPS receiver to agree with the map.
In fact due to the movement of the Earth's crust, the whole of Great Britain is moving North East wrt WGS84 and so the Greenwich meridian is actually getting further away from the meridian as shown on a GPS receiver.
Newton said "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Taken out of context it seems like a noble thing to say, but it was actually intended as an insult to Robert Hooke his contemporary and hated rival, who was very short and by all accounts sensitive about the fact.
I feel qualified to answer this question since "none" is the response I put when filling in my census form.
Why did I answer "none"? Ultimately, I believe it is possible to explain the phenomena in the Universe without resorting to the device of a deity. If you are trying to explain the existence of complex objects like people, it is intellectually dishonest to invoke something that is more complex than the thing you are trying to explain. I believe that the Universe is ultimately explainable by simple (sort of) physical laws and the so called paranormal phenomena such as ESP, ghosts etc (if they exist - in my opinion they don't except as psychological phenomena, but I'm keeping an open mind) are explainable by laws we haven't found yet.
That doesn't mean there isn't room for a god. Perhaps one does exist in the Universe, perhaps one exists outside the Universe in a bigger reality. I just don't think one is necessary. This means I'm not an atheist, but neither do I worship a deity. Therefore I have no religion.
In what way is this a "new kind of war"? Several countries in the World, including my own (the UK) have been fighting this kind of war against terrorists for decades. Perhaps the USA can learn some lessons from other people's fights.
Firstly, it's going to be a long hard fight. The British Government's fight against the Provisional IRA lasted more than 30 years and although the British had the upper hand when the IRA declared a ceasfire, they were certainly not defeated at that point. Also, the British had home advantage. That is, the IRA's bases were in British territory or in the Republic of Ireland next door. The Republic, while in sympathy with the aims of the IRA definitely disapproved of its methods. The people in the IRA are culturally similar to the people fighting them (i.e. Western European Christian background). This makes it much easier to infiltrate their organisation.
Secondly, traditional military action has to be used very carefully if at all. Any highly publicised military action can be twisted by the terrorists to turn people merely sympathetic to their cause into new recruits.
Thirdly, intelligence is the key, agents on the ground in particular. It's all very well to have satellite surveillance, but how do you tell a suburban house containing a group of dangerous terrorists from a suburban house containing an all-American family with a satellite? Terrists use ordinary society as their cover. You have to get among them.
This is not a new kind of war. Lots of the US's friends have an idea of how it works and what it might look like and I'm sure the US government is talking to them right now.
cmd.exe is the command line interpreter for windows. It's analogue on any Unix-alike is /bin/sh
I don't believe the American People (note capitalisation of "People") much less the CIA have ever supported the IRA. I thought the funding of the IRA from people in the US was mainly by Irish Americans with a romantic view of their ancestor country who are out of touch with the realities of Northern Ireland today.
In my memory (I'm 35) loyalist paramilitaries have always been regarded as criminals and murderers - same as the IRA. However, if you look further back at the history of Ireland there is a lot of stuff done in the name of the British Government which can be described as unpleasant at best.