The surprising thing is that Microsoft seems to be taking such a long-winded approach to achieving an outcome which is already easily produced by things like ISYS and its various competitors.
You don't need an SQL database hiding inside your file system if you want to provide unified searching across disparate data sources (email, office, websites, SQL, etc). People have been doing it for years. Bill's just chosen the wrong means to the right end.
Achieving orbit has almost *nothing* to do with altitude. It's all to do with horizontal speed. The only good thing about altitude is that it gets you out of the atmosphere which would otherwise keep slowing you down due to friction.
To put this in perspective, the amount of energy you need to expend to get sufficient horizontal velocity (about 7 miles per second), if expended going straight up (like the X-Prize people are doing), would take you 700 miles high.
In simple terms, going 50 miles straight up is dealing with about one fourteenth the amount of energy you'd need to deal with to attain orbit.
Seems to me the big thing Gmail has to offer is searchability. But you won't need to sign up for a "hotmail" style email account for get decent search.
Anyway, how many corporates are going to abandon Outlook and go in through a webmail interface instead? For that matter, how many non-corporates are going to abandon Eudora ?
Webmail interfaces are fine for remote accessing your email, but nobody in their right mind uses them for infrastructural purposes. If you want decent search in your existing email client, then use ISYS email and keep using the mail client you want to.
Here's the funny bit -- the mainstream media has picked this up and started running with it, but have neglected to include the bits that make it clear to the technically informed that this is a joke.
So the mainstream press have fallen for it. Ha ha, it is to laugh. Problem is, when Google does eventually IPO, they're gonna be looking for favorable coverage from those same media outlets they made look like gooses. I wonder if the individuals in those media organizations will remember how Google made them look stoopid.
Not quite so clever. Also, Google News has picked up this story itself, linking to the mainstream stories that don't include the tip-offs that its a joke.
Thus it has become a self-replicating disinformation virus, quite disconnected from the original "joke" press-release.
Well alright then, it's lParam being unreasonable - whichever you prefer.
The point is, Hungarian notation tells you how things were, not how they are, and so you end up thinking wParam and lParam have two different fundamental data types, when in fact they are identical.
Anyway, by extending your defense of wParam, in Win64 wParam will be 64 bits wide, while lParam will presumably remain 32, thereby creating the situation in which something which isn't long is longer than something that is!
Pun intended. For those who don't know, Windows SendMessage takes two parameters in addition to the message number: lParam and wParam.
You guessed it, in Win32, wParam is 32-bits long.
Hungarian notation is misleading and counter-productive, and should be consumed with the greatest of caution.
Two things you can't say
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Here's a couple:
You have to pretend that men and women are equal, even when it's obvious there are some pretty fundamental differences between the genders. Those differences may or may not be pertinent in any given situation, but you're not allowed to talk about them.
You have to avoid commenting on any difference between the races, even though it's obvious that some races tend to be better at some things than others (maybe it's ok to say that), and ergo unavoidably some races are worse at some things than others (and it's not okay to say that).
In general, you have to avoid any use of generalities, even though generalities are often useful ways to express means and modes.
For example, "black people are better dancers than white people". Yes, there will always be some pedant showing an example of a given white person who is a better dancer than a given white person, but that does not affect the usefulness of the generalisation.
Another example: next major internation sporting event, compare the relative representation of the various races in the finals of the 100m sprint. Now do it again in the swimming.
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"? In one scenario, we are acknowleding that men tend to be physically stronger than women (even though you can find counterexamples), and in the other we are not.
People are different. Genders are different. Races are different. Short people can't reach the top shelf. Fat people can't fit in airline seats. Some genders can't reverse park. Generalities sometimes have a degree of truth. Let's get over it.
People seem to have become disconnected to the fact that Gordon Moore only ever pointed out this relationship as a joke. He never seriously suggested that this was a trend that would continue, rather he was pointing out how rapidly things had moved in recent times, and his extrapolation was humorously (to engineers) pointing out the shape of the curve. Of course that wouldn't continue.
It's a bit like when my daughter was born, one of the photos I put on her website was captioned "she's doubled in age in the last 24 hours - surely this can't continue". You can get seemingly odd curve shapes when things are young, but you don't take them and extrapolate to the longer term. Everyone knows that, and that's what made Moore's curve amusing.
The staggering thing about Moore's Law is that reality then proceeded to follow it. Unprecented !
VB pre-dates Delphi. Early VB versions existed at about the same time as Turbo Pascal for Windows, but TPW was little at doing Windows programs than was C. If you wanted RAD GUI development under Windows, VB was it, even with all it's, ahem, pecadiloes. Delphi came second, and was a welcome breath of fresh air because it could do the RAD GUI stuff, but was still based on a real language.
I'll continue this conversation if you provide me with your credit card number. This conversation is a free service, and I will not charge your credit card. Your credit card number is just required for security purposes.
Do you really believe that large companies do no wrong, and make no mistakes? Are you really such a bunny that you give your credit card to anyone with a brand name who asks for it?
That's my point, "man". Wake up to the real world. Look around you. Observe corporate malfeance. Now wonder if you really want to give your credit card number out every time you're asked. It's not a matter of paranoia. It's a matter of not being a schmuck.
From the FAQ: Why do I need to enter a credit card number?
We require credit card information for security purposes only. We will not charge your credit card account any fees for using the Search Inside the Book feature.
Tampere University is also the place which claimed to discover an anti-gravity effect. Make of that what you will, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has actually seen the IO2 device in person, not just heresay from the founder.
There's some strange things being said, eg: "But if you see it, and even accounting for all the issues surrounding it being a hand-built prototype, you will be amazed." What issues surround a hand-built prototype? So the wiring is on veroboard rather than PCB. So the case looks a little utilitarian. So there's no setup program and there's wires going everywhere. So what. If it works as claimed, then it's amazing, regardless of the build-quality. If it doesn't work as claimed, then it's not because it's hand-built - it's because its bunkum.
You can't shoehorn the world into a hierarchy; not even multiple hierarchies. It just doesn't work that way. It's like someone with a hammer trying to view the world as a nail, or multiple nails, just because that's the only tool he's got.
I organize my emails by putting everything in a single folder. No need to agonise over classification or get grumpy at myself for misfiling. Then I use ISYS to find whatever I need to find, using a plain english description of my need. Works a treat. ISYS is a swiss army knife search tool, but best of all, there's a stripped-down, email-only version coming out in a couple of weeks.
They could maneuver in a way similar to that sailing ships use to go upwind. By angling the sails correctly and using the sun's gravity field, a solar sail vessel can fly "upwind" toward the sun.
I doubt it. When sailing boats go to windward they do so largely because the sail is operating as an airfoil due to the bournoulli effect, and the boat effectively gets "sucked" to windward by the low pressure region on the leeward side of the sail -- exactly the same way an aircraft flies. The keel prevents side slip and keeps the boat oriented the right way.
Only when sailing boats go dead down wind does the sail act as a drag device or parachute. For most boats, this is the least efficient point of sailing. It's also worth mentioning that boats going into the wind create their own "apparent" breeze, thereby creating even more lift from the wing (sail).
Because the solar "sail" is more like a parachute than a "wing", it's not going to generate lift on its leeward side, and therefore can't go to windward the way yachts can.
Even old square riggers are not a good analogy because, although they don't have airfoil cross-sections on their sails, they could sail across the wind by means of vector resolution between the force of the sail and the force of their keels and hulls on the water. The spacecraft has no "ether" for it's keel to push sideways against.
As for being a normal rocket and cost -- sure, it would have cost less. OTOH, the cost *per flight* would have been higher, because the vehicle wouldn't be reusable. There's a *reason* they built the shuttle, laddie buck.
Uh, no. The shuttle costs $500M per flight and is reusable. Soyuz costs $10M per flight (they charge $20M) and is disposable, and has a superior safety record. Sure, it's a bit smaller and has no coke machine. But it costs 2% of a shuttle flight.
My advice would be to take the accounting and ecconomics electives in school which I avoided like the plague. When your software company becomes a success, you'll really wish you'd had some basic background in things which suddenly became very important.
Completely? I doubt it. They were inside a structure designed to handle those temperatures.
No they weren't. The Orbiter is built largely from very normal aluminium. The thermal protection is provided by tiles. There are two types of tiles: black and white. Only the black ones can stand the full temperature of re-entry, and they are placed over the nose and flat bottom of the craft. The white tiles on the top and sides can only deal with the lesser temeratures that leak around.
The shuttle re-enters "bottom first", not in a glide like an aircraft (that bit comes later). The black tiles on the flat bottom create the same effect as an Apollo or Soyuz capsule, and cause an area of ionisation which actually takes the brunt of the heat like a buffer.
So it requires fairly precise alignment to make the whole thing work. Once a wing rips off, the structure will tumble and rapidly decelerate. If there are organic remains, it is because the temperatures were not very high for very long, not because the crew were encased in something that was designed to withstand that temperature from any orientation.
What about "understanding why you are there"?
on
How to be a Programmer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Something many programmers fail to understand is exactly why they are given their monthly pay cheque. It's not to write great code, or to do clever things, or to be the only one who can solve problems when they occur. It's to bring about a business benefit.
Your employer may make widgets, or run delivery trucks, or process financial transactions, or manufacture cars. Your goal is to help in that process.
Programmers can have a tendancy to be easily "disconnected" from the mission of employer, and can think the goal is to write some cool Java, or to make the source code library work better. Yes, that's the job at hand, but it's not why they pay you each month. They pay you to help them build cars and sell them at a profit. It's an important thing for programmers to have at least somewhere in their conciousness.
Ignoring glizty features like clunky video, and just talking about the ability to make and receive phone calls, pretty much the whole world is way ahead of the US in mobile telephones.
And the "large country" argument doesn't hold water. Mobile telephony in Australia is a generation ahead of the US, and we're about the same land mass with one fifteenth the population. Ok, coverage ain't great in the middle, but you can make a phone call in Melbourne, and hold the same connection while you drive 4000km to Cape York.
I once stood on the ancient Greek island of Delos which was once the centre of the known universe, and received a mobile phone call from someone back home in Oz who'd just dialed my regular number. Awesome.
At my employer we put interviewees in a room with a computer and give them a practical hands-on programming test to complete in an hour or so.
We find there's plenty of people who can talk the talk, but not that many who can walk the walk. After all, if you can't cut code fluently under pressure, then what real use are you where the rubber meets the road </cliche>.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need an SQL database hiding inside your file system if you want to provide unified searching across disparate data sources (email, office, websites, SQL, etc). People have been doing it for years. Bill's just chosen the wrong means to the right end.
Take heart:- if, when you were in high school, you had a favorite search engine, then it is not too much of a while ago ;)
To put this in perspective, the amount of energy you need to expend to get sufficient horizontal velocity (about 7 miles per second), if expended going straight up (like the X-Prize people are doing), would take you 700 miles high.
In simple terms, going 50 miles straight up is dealing with about one fourteenth the amount of energy you'd need to deal with to attain orbit.
Anyway, how many corporates are going to abandon Outlook and go in through a webmail interface instead? For that matter, how many non-corporates are going to abandon Eudora ?
Webmail interfaces are fine for remote accessing your email, but nobody in their right mind uses them for infrastructural purposes. If you want decent search in your existing email client, then use ISYS email and keep using the mail client you want to.
So the mainstream press have fallen for it. Ha ha, it is to laugh. Problem is, when Google does eventually IPO, they're gonna be looking for favorable coverage from those same media outlets they made look like gooses. I wonder if the individuals in those media organizations will remember how Google made them look stoopid.
Not quite so clever. Also, Google News has picked up this story itself, linking to the mainstream stories that don't include the tip-offs that its a joke.
Thus it has become a self-replicating disinformation virus, quite disconnected from the original "joke" press-release.
The point is, Hungarian notation tells you how things were, not how they are, and so you end up thinking wParam and lParam have two different fundamental data types, when in fact they are identical.
Anyway, by extending your defense of wParam, in Win64 wParam will be 64 bits wide, while lParam will presumably remain 32, thereby creating the situation in which something which isn't long is longer than something that is!
You guessed it, in Win32, wParam is 32-bits long.
Hungarian notation is misleading and counter-productive, and should be consumed with the greatest of caution.
For example, "black people are better dancers than white people". Yes, there will always be some pedant showing an example of a given white person who is a better dancer than a given white person, but that does not affect the usefulness of the generalisation.
Another example: next major internation sporting event, compare the relative representation of the various races in the finals of the 100m sprint. Now do it again in the swimming.
So here's a question you can't ask: why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"? In one scenario, we are acknowleding that men tend to be physically stronger than women (even though you can find counterexamples), and in the other we are not.
People are different. Genders are different. Races are different. Short people can't reach the top shelf. Fat people can't fit in airline seats. Some genders can't reverse park. Generalities sometimes have a degree of truth. Let's get over it.
It's a bit like when my daughter was born, one of the photos I put on her website was captioned "she's doubled in age in the last 24 hours - surely this can't continue". You can get seemingly odd curve shapes when things are young, but you don't take them and extrapolate to the longer term. Everyone knows that, and that's what made Moore's curve amusing.
The staggering thing about Moore's Law is that reality then proceeded to follow it. Unprecented !
VB pre-dates Delphi. Early VB versions existed at about the same time as Turbo Pascal for Windows, but TPW was little at doing Windows programs than was C. If you wanted RAD GUI development under Windows, VB was it, even with all it's, ahem, pecadiloes. Delphi came second, and was a welcome breath of fresh air because it could do the RAD GUI stuff, but was still based on a real language.
I'll continue this conversation if you provide me with your credit card number. This conversation is a free service, and I will not charge your credit card. Your credit card number is just required for security purposes.
Do you really believe that large companies do no wrong, and make no mistakes? Are you really such a bunny that you give your credit card to anyone with a brand name who asks for it?
That's my point, "man". Wake up to the real world. Look around you. Observe corporate malfeance. Now wonder if you really want to give your credit card number out every time you're asked. It's not a matter of paranoia. It's a matter of not being a schmuck.
Why do I need to enter a credit card number?
We require credit card information for security purposes only. We will not charge your credit card account any fees for using the Search Inside the Book feature.
Uhuh. Security. Whose?
Yeah, I want to be financially secure too !
There's some strange things being said, eg: "But if you see it, and even accounting for all the issues surrounding it being a hand-built prototype, you will be amazed." What issues surround a hand-built prototype? So the wiring is on veroboard rather than PCB. So the case looks a little utilitarian. So there's no setup program and there's wires going everywhere. So what. If it works as claimed, then it's amazing, regardless of the build-quality. If it doesn't work as claimed, then it's not because it's hand-built - it's because its bunkum.
I organize my emails by putting everything in a single folder. No need to agonise over classification or get grumpy at myself for misfiling. Then I use ISYS to find whatever I need to find, using a plain english description of my need. Works a treat. ISYS is a swiss army knife search tool, but best of all, there's a stripped-down, email-only version coming out in a couple of weeks.
The NASA website also says sailing boats can't sail closer than 45 degrees to the wind ! Ha !
I doubt it. When sailing boats go to windward they do so largely because the sail is operating as an airfoil due to the bournoulli effect, and the boat effectively gets "sucked" to windward by the low pressure region on the leeward side of the sail -- exactly the same way an aircraft flies. The keel prevents side slip and keeps the boat oriented the right way.
Only when sailing boats go dead down wind does the sail act as a drag device or parachute. For most boats, this is the least efficient point of sailing. It's also worth mentioning that boats going into the wind create their own "apparent" breeze, thereby creating even more lift from the wing (sail).
Because the solar "sail" is more like a parachute than a "wing", it's not going to generate lift on its leeward side, and therefore can't go to windward the way yachts can.
Even old square riggers are not a good analogy because, although they don't have airfoil cross-sections on their sails, they could sail across the wind by means of vector resolution between the force of the sail and the force of their keels and hulls on the water. The spacecraft has no "ether" for it's keel to push sideways against.
Uh, no. The shuttle costs $500M per flight and is reusable. Soyuz costs $10M per flight (they charge $20M) and is disposable, and has a superior safety record. Sure, it's a bit smaller and has no coke machine. But it costs 2% of a shuttle flight.
In this case, reusable != cheaper or safer.
My advice would be to take the accounting and ecconomics electives in school which I avoided like the plague. When your software company becomes a success, you'll really wish you'd had some basic background in things which suddenly became very important.
No they weren't. The Orbiter is built largely from very normal aluminium. The thermal protection is provided by tiles. There are two types of tiles: black and white. Only the black ones can stand the full temperature of re-entry, and they are placed over the nose and flat bottom of the craft. The white tiles on the top and sides can only deal with the lesser temeratures that leak around.
The shuttle re-enters "bottom first", not in a glide like an aircraft (that bit comes later). The black tiles on the flat bottom create the same effect as an Apollo or Soyuz capsule, and cause an area of ionisation which actually takes the brunt of the heat like a buffer.
So it requires fairly precise alignment to make the whole thing work. Once a wing rips off, the structure will tumble and rapidly decelerate. If there are organic remains, it is because the temperatures were not very high for very long, not because the crew were encased in something that was designed to withstand that temperature from any orientation.
Your employer may make widgets, or run delivery trucks, or process financial transactions, or manufacture cars. Your goal is to help in that process.
Programmers can have a tendancy to be easily "disconnected" from the mission of employer, and can think the goal is to write some cool Java, or to make the source code library work better. Yes, that's the job at hand, but it's not why they pay you each month. They pay you to help them build cars and sell them at a profit. It's an important thing for programmers to have at least somewhere in their conciousness.
The Lensman series , by EE "Doc" Smith. Absolutely classic 1940's space opera in five volumes, from which Star Wars derives a bunch of its themes.
Actually, Chris discovered what came to be known as Cuba, or at least the Carribean. Columbus never even saw what became America.
... it just won't seem the same.
And the "large country" argument doesn't hold water. Mobile telephony in Australia is a generation ahead of the US, and we're about the same land mass with one fifteenth the population. Ok, coverage ain't great in the middle, but you can make a phone call in Melbourne, and hold the same connection while you drive 4000km to Cape York.
I once stood on the ancient Greek island of Delos which was once the centre of the known universe, and received a mobile phone call from someone back home in Oz who'd just dialed my regular number. Awesome.
We find there's plenty of people who can talk the talk, but not that many who can walk the walk. After all, if you can't cut code fluently under pressure, then what real use are you where the rubber meets the road </cliche>.