To be honest, that's also true. I don't really listen to unscientific opinions on matters of science, so I really tune out all of the people who are doing global warming advocacy or whatever you call it.
Global warming deniers generally are neither good at science nor at statistics.
99.99% of the GW believers are earth worshiping religious fruitcakes that only spit off a few talking points to pretend they are hip. Seriously, do you think that aging folk tart Sheryl Crow actually can even write a computer program?
Erm... did you actually look at those values ? Or even plug them into Excel/Matlab/Octave/whatever and trend them (with a larger running average than 12 months) ? If not, then I suggest you do that.
Global warming deniers generally are neither good at science nor at statistics.
Uh, did you look at the numbers? I mean, seriously. The numbers are not absolute temperature averages, they are a number that already statistically indicates above or below normal. It already factors in seasonality and all of that other stuff.
So, if you have got a negative number, it means the region in the column shown did in fact get colder. Secondly, there is a comparison set of columns with a twelve month moving average. Right now, the twelve month moving average is.089 degrees above normal.. however, the trend of that is downwards and has been since August 2007.
The basic theory against AGW is that the sun controls climate in a way that is linked to sunspots but is not understood -yet-. So, it's pretty simple to test. If there is a continued period of low sunspot activity by the sun, then the planet will cool off. If the planet heats up, then, hey, sunspot dudes are wrong and people on the coasts need to learn to swim;.
But... since there's been no or few sunspots for the last couple of months, and the earth is cooling down, AND, the La Nina that was previously cited for the unseasonable cooling is gone, well, I'm betting on the Little Ice Age.
some of the NYT comments are worse. The guy touted a lunar sample mission by the Russians and they certainly didn't bring any lunar rocks back during the height of the space race and quite honestly I don't think anyone has brought anything back since the astronauts picked them and returned them.
Some of the other stuff, too, is the claim that 800 lbs of lunar geology is enough to tell the story of the moon. We still get cannot get the earth's story straight, geologically speaking, and we're standing on the samples! There's been no systematic mineral assay, no samples in the mountains, no samples in the big caves thought to be on the moon, no samples from the polar regions and really, not much at all.
You know, I'm not a big fan of cops, but it never ceases to amaze me, how software engineers on./ rant and rave about everyone collecting information on other people, but make every exception for themselves.
IF civil rights is that important, that you want to go on and rail about Obama's FISA betrayal and horridly fill out online donations to the ACLU over the idea of your government collecting information to aid in counter-intelligence against not only the "terrohistas", but also the Chinese, Europeans and anyone else who might have their information collected by their governments, then that's worthy.
But, I would like to know, what exactly about a video game, shopping experience or some other fluffy adventure that entitles you as a software developer to violate people's rights to privacy, for your own ends, when you would deny that same efficiency to everyone else? You aren't elected to represent anyone, but our government is.
We all know the word. We all have an idea of what it means
This bill has nothing to do with terrorism. It has everything to do with saying whether or not the USA can spy on people in other countries who may be talking to people in ours. Right now, this is in the cause of "fighting terrorism", but it could just as easily be used against drug trafficking, counter intelligence, quite literally, all the stuff the CIA/FBI does.
Has anyone ever thought how much the government might be interested in monitoring the communications of people from China back to their homeland? The Chinese government essentially data mines all this stuff to get an aggregate picture of how the USA works, and I think we'd like to know what picture that they see.
Just because something makes sense doesn't make it constitutional. Congress can't make an end run around the Constitution. Don't like the way the Constitution prevents such and such? Amend the Constitution.
It really depends on what the intent of the bill of rights is. In the case of search and seizure, there's some that would argue that the they were not trying to instill a right to privacy as much as they were trying to guard against the federal government repeating a popular tactic of the king, which was to send out his agents to disrupt people's lives by rummaging through people's stuff and periodically arrest them. The idea is, sometimes, yes, the government does have to disrupt people's lives by rummage through their stuff.
Now, the question is, does, a broad data mining and "hit" search constitute a disruption? You don't know if the government is searching you, right now, so does it disrupt you?
I mean, we have our data searched by the private sector all the time and quite honestly many of us on this board are getting paid to develop tools to gather and manage this data, and worse, in the early days, many of us built these big data farms thinking that it would be cool. Woops.
Let them starve. I don't see any Indian troops fighting with the USA in Iraq. Where's that Indian help in Afghanistan? Jobs in the USA should go to Americans first.
Read the story. One Indian guy goes from American company to American company, merrily f--- over Americans to benefit Indians back in India. Has nothing to do with corporatism and everything to do with nationalism.
Start a blog, start showing example scripts and things you know. Host code. Don't write it -all- for the man, because the man isn't going to give you everything. You have to always leave something in the tank for yourself.
I mean, come, on, if some schmoo has a vapo solar panel and can get himself slashdotted, maybe I ought to start selling fusion reactors, ready for delivery, "real soon now", just to get the clicks!
They are actually ramping up production of a 120mgy facility in Seneca and for them it is a race against time - will they be profitably producing biofuels before they run out of money, or will they not. Their stock is taking one heck of a beating right now, but, I'm hanging in their in hopes that this magical alternative energy future pans out for real, rather than just the hypothetical dreams of a few pundits.
I think instead of having standards bodies, perhaps we should just say, defacto, that the open source application that manages an open document is in fact the reference implementation. It has all the knowledge in code, for public display and re-use, and that's way better than mere requirements. Like, I'm a total Windows bigot, but I do more C++ on Linux and I now expect that Visual C++ should actually perform the same way that GNU does, rather than vice versa, because I trust GNU more.
You mentioned writing a game for Macintosh. If you wanted to do that, a Macintosh would be the better platform to work from as opposed to porting from another. There's several great tools at your disposal; Xcode, OpenGL, ClanLib, SDL is a great combo. You can do the development on Linux just as easily, but I really have enjoyed Xcode. You might too.
Actually, if I did write a game for a *nix, it probably would be for Mac. Only because, while SDL + OpenGL for Linux is pretty solid, the sound situation seems up in the air for me because it looks like there are so many different sound solutions out there for it. On the other hand, the Mac is a standardized platform. I've heard a lot of good things about XCode and I couldn't be a self respecting Geek without giving it a shot.
Dude, the lunar lander program crashed repeatedly on Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin right when they were trying to land on the moon. It was so bad, that mission control basically told them to ignore it and Neil went ahead and landed the thing really by the seat of his own pants. You really can't have a bug much more worse than that!
When you think about it, space software is probably the most unreliable software there is. I mean, it is a classic cathedral design, has only a handful of users, and so, yeah, they can do a lot of testing, but, they miss stuff. Look at how often they have to upload patches to the ship while it is in flight.
Windows 3.11 wasn't a truly multitasking operating system, so that, if an application was doing something in between Windows messages, it genuinely owned the whole machine. If you are doing a near real time system, you probably don't want to lose a time slot in the middle of a roller coaster ride so that some other daemon could fire off and do something else. So yeah, Windows 3.11 might actually work rather well, so long as the application wasn't trying to allocate too many resource handles.
Actually, I wonder why MS wouldn't release a non-preemptive Windows, just for this purpose. It would be a lot more reliable for some applications.
Then you invent some arbitrary rules that the program should have followed to prevent you from screwing up.
I'm sorry that you feel that these are arbitrary rules, but really, this is consistent, standard practice in computers.
Every repository of any kind must impose its own keys on data. It's really simple. You can't be relying on someone else's external key because in general you can't assume that is unique, particularly when you start mixing information from a variety of sources.
XML, C#, Java, C++, all have namespaces. Name spaces allow you to mix in multiple sources into your data, program, or even a web page, all which must deal with the problem of aggregation. In all cases, you have a foreign sort of data you are integrating, and a way for the consumer of that information to organize that into namespaces.
More directly, in document management systems, dating all the way back to big systems used by the government to many systems used by corporations, every document, regardless of its file path and place of origin, receives a unique name on import. This not only makes it easier for the developers of those systems to attach meta-data to the document being imported, but it also allows the repository to function as an aggregation tool. For example, you could, take a bunch of documents from many sources, ram into a document management system, and then, export those documents back out into a single folder, and the resulting documents would be uniquely named because the repository correctly managed the names.
Or, you could easily and consistently make URIs for them on web pages. Even better blogs do this by default, although it is admittedly not as important because we do have a sort of assumption that a good URI is unique.
In any case, this practice is so pervasive that relational database vendors ALL follow a similar pattern to support the inclusion of images and documents into their database. They can either link to a document, store the document directly, or, allow the developer to store the originating path as a field. Regardless of which approach is adopted, the DBA will invariably create his own key on that document table, and use that key as a primary key. This is often an integer and is often autopopulated by the database engine using either autonumber in SQL Server or sequences in Oracle. I tend to prefer Oracle sequences as I think they are easier to work with, but, to each his own.
It is interesting to note then, that the file system is actually not very good at managing names and this is actually a good reason for why they fail. Why do you have to have the same name for something in two different places on the computer? In a perfect world, a filename ought to be unique by itself, and, where it is stored in a file system would be only an organizational convention, but not an identifying one. Then you wouldn't need stupid things like PATHs at all, and all the security holes that they open up, a problem with, incidentally, that this very message board takes its name from!
With all that said, it was reasonable to think that a very expensive product like Aperture would, in fact, do the right thing with its images, which is why I bought for my wife. Apple is a damned good software company and they, of all people, should know better as they have been wrestling with namespace problems since the inception of personal computers, but, in the case of Aperture, they blew it. And, no, I didn't sell the Mac because Aperture screwed up. Aperture screwed up as she was exporting images out AFTER we sold the thing. There's no lie, only disappointment in a product. It's no different than someone who buys a Ford, loses a tranny, and then never buys a Ford again. In my case too, my Apple "hatred" really isn't hatred. I still admire Apple's service and I like Macintosh, I really do. But I think Linux is a better operating system for server applications and that's where all the money is that these days. Now, I might still get a Mac to write a game for, bu
No, that's retarded. Whenever any system maintains a repository of any kind, you expect it to place its own names on things. Anything other than that is simply unacceptable. You don't buy a product like that to worry about filenames.... you buy it do to things right..
Secondly, why are you so moronically assuming that I switched because of Aperture? Aperture might keep me from switching back because the hole in the repository design made me lose my faith in Apple, but the real problem was that there are more Photoshop plugins for windows than there are for mac, so she switched.
Oh, please. He's blaming the OS for the failures of the app. I fully admit Aperture isn't the greatest. I just don't see the point in purchasing an entirely new system to run an app that you could run on your existing machine. So, come again?
Where did I say that we got rid of the computer because of the Aperture? We got rid of it because it couldn't run all the Photoshop plug ins that Windows could, and Windows PCs were faster. You will note that Jobs did switch Apple to Intel shortly after we unloaded our G5.. so I guess Apple agreed!
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, that's also true. I don't really listen to unscientific opinions on matters of science, so I really tune out all of the people who are doing global warming advocacy or whatever you call it.
That's fair.
I mean, we have all the copyright thugs going around chasing after people, and here you go, chatting up a movie!
Global warming deniers generally are neither good at science nor at statistics.
99.99% of the GW believers are earth worshiping religious fruitcakes that only spit off a few talking points to pretend they are hip. Seriously, do you think that aging folk tart Sheryl Crow actually can even write a computer program?
Erm ... did you actually look at those values ? Or even plug them into Excel/Matlab/Octave/whatever and trend them (with a larger running average than 12 months) ? If not, then I suggest you do that.
Global warming deniers generally are neither good at science nor at statistics.
Uh, did you look at the numbers? I mean, seriously. The numbers are not absolute temperature averages, they are a number that already statistically indicates above or below normal. It already factors in seasonality and all of that other stuff.
So, if you have got a negative number, it means the region in the column shown did in fact get colder. Secondly, there is a comparison set of columns with a twelve month moving average. Right now, the twelve month moving average is .089 degrees above normal.. however, the trend of that is downwards and has been since August 2007.
The basic theory against AGW is that the sun controls climate in a way that is linked to sunspots but is not understood -yet-. So, it's pretty simple to test. If there is a continued period of low sunspot activity by the sun, then the planet will cool off. If the planet heats up, then, hey, sunspot dudes are wrong and people on the coasts need to learn to swim;.
But... since there's been no or few sunspots for the last couple of months, and the earth is cooling down, AND, the La Nina that was previously cited for the unseasonable cooling is gone, well, I'm betting on the Little Ice Age.
Satellite global temps
The planetary temperatures are either flat or cooling down. Since its been two weeks since the last sunspot, can anyone say "Little Ice Age"?
some of the NYT comments are worse. The guy touted a lunar sample mission by the Russians and they certainly didn't bring any lunar rocks back during the height of the space race and quite honestly I don't think anyone has brought anything back since the astronauts picked them and returned them.
Some of the other stuff, too, is the claim that 800 lbs of lunar geology is enough to tell the story of the moon. We still get cannot get the earth's story straight, geologically speaking, and we're standing on the samples! There's been no systematic mineral assay, no samples in the mountains, no samples in the big caves thought to be on the moon, no samples from the polar regions and really, not much at all.
You know, I'm not a big fan of cops, but it never ceases to amaze me, how software engineers on ./ rant and rave about everyone collecting information on other people, but make every exception for themselves.
IF civil rights is that important, that you want to go on and rail about Obama's FISA betrayal and horridly fill out online donations to the ACLU over the idea of your government collecting information to aid in counter-intelligence against not only the "terrohistas", but also the Chinese, Europeans and anyone else who might have their information collected by their governments, then that's worthy.
But, I would like to know, what exactly about a video game, shopping experience or some other fluffy adventure that entitles you as a software developer to violate people's rights to privacy, for your own ends, when you would deny that same efficiency to everyone else? You aren't elected to represent anyone, but our government is.
We all know the word. We all have an idea of what it means
This bill has nothing to do with terrorism. It has everything to do with saying whether or not the USA can spy on people in other countries who may be talking to people in ours. Right now, this is in the cause of "fighting terrorism", but it could just as easily be used against drug trafficking, counter intelligence, quite literally, all the stuff the CIA/FBI does.
Has anyone ever thought how much the government might be interested in monitoring the communications of people from China back to their homeland? The Chinese government essentially data mines all this stuff to get an aggregate picture of how the USA works, and I think we'd like to know what picture that they see.
Just because something makes sense doesn't make it constitutional. Congress can't make an end run around the Constitution. Don't like the way the Constitution prevents such and such? Amend the Constitution.
It really depends on what the intent of the bill of rights is. In the case of search and seizure, there's some that would argue that the they were not trying to instill a right to privacy as much as they were trying to guard against the federal government repeating a popular tactic of the king, which was to send out his agents to disrupt people's lives by rummaging through people's stuff and periodically arrest them. The idea is, sometimes, yes, the government does have to disrupt people's lives by rummage through their stuff.
Now, the question is, does, a broad data mining and "hit" search constitute a disruption? You don't know if the government is searching you, right now, so does it disrupt you?
I mean, we have our data searched by the private sector all the time and quite honestly many of us on this board are getting paid to develop tools to gather and manage this data, and worse, in the early days, many of us built these big data farms thinking that it would be cool. Woops.
I wonder what sort of cut he is getting. I bet there are some kickbacks to him or to some of his family back home.
Of course there are.
Let them starve. I don't see any Indian troops fighting with the USA in Iraq. Where's that Indian help in Afghanistan? Jobs in the USA should go to Americans first.
Read the story. One Indian guy goes from American company to American company, merrily f--- over Americans to benefit Indians back in India. Has nothing to do with corporatism and everything to do with nationalism.
Start a blog, start showing example scripts and things you know. Host code. Don't write it -all- for the man, because the man isn't going to give you everything. You have to always leave something in the tank for yourself.
Cops suck.
I mean, come, on, if some schmoo has a vapo solar panel and can get himself slashdotted, maybe I ought to start selling fusion reactors, ready for delivery, "real soon now", just to get the clicks!
Called Novabiosource Fuels. Ticker NBF (AMEX).
They are actually ramping up production of a 120mgy facility in Seneca and for them it is a race against time - will they be profitably producing biofuels before they run out of money, or will they not. Their stock is taking one heck of a beating right now, but, I'm hanging in their in hopes that this magical alternative energy future pans out for real, rather than just the hypothetical dreams of a few pundits.
I think instead of having standards bodies, perhaps we should just say, defacto, that the open source application that manages an open document is in fact the reference implementation. It has all the knowledge in code, for public display and re-use, and that's way better than mere requirements. Like, I'm a total Windows bigot, but I do more C++ on Linux and I now expect that Visual C++ should actually perform the same way that GNU does, rather than vice versa, because I trust GNU more.
You mentioned writing a game for Macintosh. If you wanted to do that, a Macintosh would be the better platform to work from as opposed to porting from another. There's several great tools at your disposal; Xcode, OpenGL, ClanLib, SDL is a great combo. You can do the development on Linux just as easily, but I really have enjoyed Xcode. You might too.
Actually, if I did write a game for a *nix, it probably would be for Mac. Only because, while SDL + OpenGL for Linux is pretty solid, the sound situation seems up in the air for me because it looks like there are so many different sound solutions out there for it. On the other hand, the Mac is a standardized platform. I've heard a lot of good things about XCode and I couldn't be a self respecting Geek without giving it a shot.
Dude, the lunar lander program crashed repeatedly on Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin right when they were trying to land on the moon. It was so bad, that mission control basically told them to ignore it and Neil went ahead and landed the thing really by the seat of his own pants. You really can't have a bug much more worse than that!
When you think about it, space software is probably the most unreliable software there is. I mean, it is a classic cathedral design, has only a handful of users, and so, yeah, they can do a lot of testing, but, they miss stuff. Look at how often they have to upload patches to the ship while it is in flight.
Windows 3.11 wasn't a truly multitasking operating system, so that, if an application was doing something in between Windows messages, it genuinely owned the whole machine. If you are doing a near real time system, you probably don't want to lose a time slot in the middle of a roller coaster ride so that some other daemon could fire off and do something else. So yeah, Windows 3.11 might actually work rather well, so long as the application wasn't trying to allocate too many resource handles.
Actually, I wonder why MS wouldn't release a non-preemptive Windows, just for this purpose. It would be a lot more reliable for some applications.
Then you invent some arbitrary rules that the program should have followed to prevent you from screwing up.
I'm sorry that you feel that these are arbitrary rules, but really, this is consistent, standard practice in computers.
Every repository of any kind must impose its own keys on data. It's really simple. You can't be relying on someone else's external key because in general you can't assume that is unique, particularly when you start mixing information from a variety of sources.
XML, C#, Java, C++, all have namespaces. Name spaces allow you to mix in multiple sources into your data, program, or even a web page, all which must deal with the problem of aggregation. In all cases, you have a foreign sort of data you are integrating, and a way for the consumer of that information to organize that into namespaces.
More directly, in document management systems, dating all the way back to big systems used by the government to many systems used by corporations, every document, regardless of its file path and place of origin, receives a unique name on import. This not only makes it easier for the developers of those systems to attach meta-data to the document being imported, but it also allows the repository to function as an aggregation tool. For example, you could, take a bunch of documents from many sources, ram into a document management system, and then, export those documents back out into a single folder, and the resulting documents would be uniquely named because the repository correctly managed the names.
Or, you could easily and consistently make URIs for them on web pages. Even better blogs do this by default, although it is admittedly not as important because we do have a sort of assumption that a good URI is unique.
In any case, this practice is so pervasive that relational database vendors ALL follow a similar pattern to support the inclusion of images and documents into their database. They can either link to a document, store the document directly, or, allow the developer to store the originating path as a field. Regardless of which approach is adopted, the DBA will invariably create his own key on that document table, and use that key as a primary key. This is often an integer and is often autopopulated by the database engine using either autonumber in SQL Server or sequences in Oracle. I tend to prefer Oracle sequences as I think they are easier to work with, but, to each his own.
It is interesting to note then, that the file system is actually not very good at managing names and this is actually a good reason for why they fail. Why do you have to have the same name for something in two different places on the computer? In a perfect world, a filename ought to be unique by itself, and, where it is stored in a file system would be only an organizational convention, but not an identifying one. Then you wouldn't need stupid things like PATHs at all, and all the security holes that they open up, a problem with, incidentally, that this very message board takes its name from!
With all that said, it was reasonable to think that a very expensive product like Aperture would, in fact, do the right thing with its images, which is why I bought for my wife. Apple is a damned good software company and they, of all people, should know better as they have been wrestling with namespace problems since the inception of personal computers, but, in the case of Aperture, they blew it. And, no, I didn't sell the Mac because Aperture screwed up. Aperture screwed up as she was exporting images out AFTER we sold the thing. There's no lie, only disappointment in a product. It's no different than someone who buys a Ford, loses a tranny, and then never buys a Ford again. In my case too, my Apple "hatred" really isn't hatred. I still admire Apple's service and I like Macintosh, I really do. But I think Linux is a better operating system for server applications and that's where all the money is that these days. Now, I might still get a Mac to write a game for, bu
Just out of curiosity, if I did happen to be a guy selling 486s, would Microsoft have a Vista version that can run on it?
Aperture doesn't generate filenames
No, that's retarded. Whenever any system maintains a repository of any kind, you expect it to place its own names on things. Anything other than that is simply unacceptable. You don't buy a product like that to worry about filenames. ... you buy it do to things right..
Secondly, why are you so moronically assuming that I switched because of Aperture? Aperture might keep me from switching back because the hole in the repository design made me lose my faith in Apple, but the real problem was that there are more Photoshop plugins for windows than there are for mac, so she switched.
Why don't you read, instead of assume?
Oh, please. He's blaming the OS for the failures of the app. I fully admit Aperture isn't the greatest. I just don't see the point in purchasing an entirely new system to run an app that you could run on your existing machine. So, come again?
Where did I say that we got rid of the computer because of the Aperture? We got rid of it because it couldn't run all the Photoshop plug ins that Windows could, and Windows PCs were faster. You will note that Jobs did switch Apple to Intel shortly after we unloaded our G5.. so I guess Apple agreed!
You do know that you'd get much higher transfer speeds with a card reader (which incidentally always works on anything) ?
She uses the card reader with her PC. I honestly never tried the card reader on ubuntu.