Actually we calculated this on a physics class a couple of years ago. Human metabolism generates about 700 W of energy. The rate of heat radiation depends on the temperature of the object. In this case, the temperature point where all energy that the metabolism creates is radiated away is about 70 degrees celsius. Of course, we had to make a number of assumptions and simplifications about human skin area, shape and such, but the professor seemed pretty confident with these figures.
The conclusion is that a human would die of warmth in vacuum, if some means of breathing were available.
The sole point of programming language abstractions is to let the programmer selectively forget things. The programming projects have grown in scope and size in recent decades (remember the old law: programs tend to grow in size until they can read mail). If modern large-sized applications (I'm speaking of tens of thousands LOCs in Java here) were written in assembly, no programmer on earth would be able to grasp the project. When a routine would be written in one part, two others would be lost in some other point in the program.
OO programming was made to deal with the problem. Strings or other "leaky abstractions" are meant to let the programmer concentrate on the real problems at hand without worrying about details. Same thing goes with capsulation: the programmer can forget the internal representation of an already done class, and use accessors to manipulate if. Thus more complex applications can be made. Think about programming an AI implementation in a low-level language instead of LISP/Prolog, and shudder.
Assembler and other low-level languages have still one function: optimization. One percent of code is run for 90 percent of program running time (think about 3D engine in a FPS), and optimizing this one percent can boost the performance a lot. However, with the advent of better compilers, the need of manual optimization diminishes, and many even argue that premature (pre-compiler) optimization is the root of all evil.
TheOnion seems to be reading Slashdot (or the other way round), because the articles mix pretty neatly. It would appear that after Kazaa we won't even have radio...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually we calculated this on a physics class a couple of years ago. Human metabolism generates about 700 W of energy. The rate of heat radiation depends on the temperature of the object. In this case, the temperature point where all energy that the metabolism creates is radiated away is about 70 degrees celsius. Of course, we had to make a number of assumptions and simplifications about human skin area, shape and such, but the professor seemed pretty confident with these figures.
The conclusion is that a human would die of warmth in vacuum, if some means of breathing were available.
- Ismo
The sole point of programming language abstractions is to let the programmer selectively forget things. The programming projects have grown in scope and size in recent decades (remember the old law: programs tend to grow in size until they can read mail). If modern large-sized applications (I'm speaking of tens of thousands LOCs in Java here) were written in assembly, no programmer on earth would be able to grasp the project. When a routine would be written in one part, two others would be lost in some other point in the program.
OO programming was made to deal with the problem. Strings or other "leaky abstractions" are meant to let the programmer concentrate on the real problems at hand without worrying about details. Same thing goes with capsulation: the programmer can forget the internal representation of an already done class, and use accessors to manipulate if. Thus more complex applications can be made. Think about programming an AI implementation in a low-level language instead of LISP/Prolog, and shudder.
Assembler and other low-level languages have still one function: optimization. One percent of code is run for 90 percent of program running time (think about 3D engine in a FPS), and optimizing this one percent can boost the performance a lot. However, with the advent of better compilers, the need of manual optimization diminishes, and many even argue that premature (pre-compiler) optimization is the root of all evil.
TheOnion seems to be reading Slashdot (or the other way round), because the articles mix pretty neatly. It would appear that after Kazaa we won't even have radio...
[ A software used like a book ]
:-)
Does any one else remember that?? I don't have a copy of it any more.
Then it seems like it was used exactly like a book -- I have lost countless books borrowing them to friends and losing them in the process.
- Ismo