Back when Siskel was still alive I noticed that if the movie was "two thumbs up" it was generally ok, and if it was "two thumbs down" it was generally bad, but when they disagreed (one of them thumbs up, the other one thumbs down), the movie could be anything between great and absolute positive crap.
His positive review of the Phantom Menace confirms this hit-and-miss quality of his reviews.
Sorry but you're wrong. In fact it already happened: GM foods (before the term had been invented) were crucial in the green revolution which brought an end to mass famine in most of the third world.
Sure, subsidies, poverty, dictatorships do not help either, but these does not mean GMs are not a great tool.
We moved our documentation to heavily tagged XML. Then we can use simple filters and load the manuals into HTML or Quarkxpress and produce on-line and off-line versions with minimal effort.
That explains it. Canada is very much the Bizarro-world version of the USA. Looks very much like the USA, just like Bizarro Superman looks very much like Superman, but in the end is very different. No guns, no president, health care for all, no rabid religious right, and a Microsoft that is pro-OSS.
It is exactly the opposite. If you have prefetch you can always claim that it wasn't you. The way things are you have no excuse for downloading those big mama porn pictures.
I checked out a copy of shipping code and asserted it all over, including some asserts that other developers said "now you are just being silly, how can this assert not be true". Within hours we found tons of dormant bugs all over the place and two of the "silly" asserts were triggered.
Our bug count list went down by 50% within a week of asserting the code, and later on, in several occasions when some customers reported bugs all we had to do was run the instrumented, asserted version and the asserts caught the bug at once.
Using an owner instrument [such as AMEX] is a little more tricky. In that case, the cashier should make a cursory check to see if the signatures match, and may ask for ID, however, much more than that is placing liability back on the store instead of the Loss Prevention department of the bank or credit card company.
Actually afaik, AMEX explicitly tells the merchants not to check the signatures of their platinum and centurion customers. They believe that (a) such customers should not face the hassle of having their signature questioned and (b) their expert system will be better at flagging the fake purchase than the cashier will be at picking up the fake signature.
Game theory? It came out of the Rand institute type research, with applications in mind from day one. The seminal paper was by Morgenstern who was an economist, and von Neumann who was a mathematician, physicist and computer scientist.
Actually, for most of its lifetime, math has been directed by practical applications. Almost all distinguished mathematicians before the XX century were also top rate physicists.
People like Conway, Penrose and Witten are good examples.
Exchanging intra vendor data in XML is no more foolish than exchanging intra vendor data in ASCII or IEEE floating point format. It almost always makes a lot of sense. If, on the other hand, you happen to have the rare application that moves massive amounts of data around, sure, feel free not to use ASCII or XML, and use your own proprietary format. Just be aware that this is the exception, not the rule.
Processing takes place, the output is put into XML which is then parsed and stored on the database. What a waste of time and effort.
Yet again you miss the point. Exporting data in XML means that if you ever have a change of format or create a second consumer application it can readily understand the data. For example you can pass it to gecko and display the data. Try that with your propietary binary format.
Exchanging intra vendor data in XML is no more foolish than exchanging intra vendor data in ASCII. It almost always makes a lot of sense. If, on the other hand, you happen to have the rare application that moves massive amounts of data around, sure, feel free not to use ASCII or XML, and use your own proprietary format. Just be aware that this is the exception, not the rule.
It drives me up the wall, that my employer is using XML to let parts of their own application communicate with other parts. DTDs are not used and all parts still need to be modified/recompiled whenever one of them changes.
Then you are not using XML right. For one the format shouldn't be changing much, if it is clearly you guys are spending too much time coding and not enough thinking. Second any application that does not use the new attribute should be able to ignore it without any compilation change. Third, two thousand floating points ain't a giant string, unless you are programming an 8086 in Elbonia. Converting two thousand numbers to text should take 50 microseconds at the most.
why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated?
Because that is the single biggest source of headaches in parsing SGML, the precursor of XML, in which such a construct is allowed.
It also makes error recovery very difficult, something that we know is quite important from all that malformed HTML code out there. The XML creators knew that too.
TB: I spent two years sitting on the Web consortium's technical architecture group, on the phone every week and face-to-face several times a year with Tim Berners-Lee. To this day, I remain fairly unconvinced of the core Semantic Web proposition.
Everyone who has actually done work on knowledge representation in the real world knows that this is a huge, difficult problem, unlikely to be solved anytime soon, as Tim Bray claims.
The only people who claim otherwise are either frauds or ignorant. The Semantic Web initiative has both: Tim Berners-Lee is very smart, but not a computer scientist, so he's not aware of the size of the challenge, plus he's a genuinely nice person, so he tends to trust others too much.
He has surrounded himself with the snake oil AI salesmen from the early 1980s who had promised us impending ubiquitous intelligent computers. Those fraudsters got found out back then, and spent the next fifteen years in academic limbo, only to be rescued by Tim Berners-Lee naivete.
Try making sense of your "compact binary config files" when something goes wrong, or when you want to port the config to a different application.
Yes, CPU cycles are cheap. CPUs sit idle over 90% of the time, even when there is a user in front of it. Spending the extra power processing 10K properly tagged files that are compatible across platforms rather than incompatible binary files is one of the best uses of raw CPU power we had.
Oh please, this does not qualify as "hacking." In fact, it is a time-honored way of navigating poorly-designed websites.
True enough. Just the other day I was clicking on a list of items on a web page and one link was broken. I noticed that the URL pattern was item1.html, item2.html, and so on and that the broken link read itme6.html (sic).
I manually edited the URL to read item6.html and voila' I got the page. Is that hacking? I think not. If all the students did was editing the URL, I do not think they should be punished. IF on the other hand they had to enter someone else's password then I say: fry 'em!
it was a science company, the heir to the great bell labs, and it got rid of its scientists!
So did AT&T and Arno Penzias (Nobel Prize winner) well before Carly. Cutting scientist started in the late 80s, so she would have hardly stood out for letting people go.
I think you are misremembering things post-facto. I knew about Carly well before she got named HP CEO. Where did I hear from her? in the trade press (Forbes, Fortune, Computer World, Business Week) where she was given fawning profiles.
Nothing specific about thieves. I have also pointed out in this thread Al Dunlap and Gil Amelio as two incompetent CEOs who looked at first like they were up to the task, but in the end were equal failures, and no one blames those on them being males either.
By blaming her incompetence on gender issues when it was simply all about incompetence the previous post made a sexist claim.
That is why I said "seemingly done a good job at Lucent". We now know she failed there too, but back then it looked like she did fine.
The same happened with Gil Amelio at Fairchild Semiconductors. While he was there everything looked hunky dory, but after he left it was clear the supposed turnaround wasn't there and neither did he turn around Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when Siskel was still alive I noticed that if the movie was "two thumbs up" it was generally ok, and if it was "two thumbs down" it was generally bad, but when they disagreed (one of them thumbs up, the other one thumbs down), the movie could be anything between great and absolute positive crap.
His positive review of the Phantom Menace confirms this hit-and-miss quality of his reviews.
Wrong. Most of the money goes to pay for the design plus the sunk cost of retooling the production line.
Actually the drop in enrolments has been so large that a shortage in four years or so is almost inevitable, outsourcing or not...
GM crops won't help third world countries a bit.
Sorry but you're wrong. In fact it already happened: GM foods (before the term had been invented) were crucial in the green revolution which brought an end to mass famine in most of the third world.
Sure, subsidies, poverty, dictatorships do not help either, but these does not mean GMs are not a great tool.
Those dates are more like the earliest possible accepted by scholars. Quite a few scholars place the last of the gospels into 120-140AD.
We moved our documentation to heavily tagged XML. Then we can use simple filters and load the manuals into HTML or Quarkxpress and produce on-line and off-line versions with minimal effort.
It is exactly the opposite. If you have prefetch you can always claim that it wasn't you. The way things are you have no excuse for downloading those big mama porn pictures.
It's nice to see that Ian Goldberg is back to its old self.
I checked out a copy of shipping code and asserted it all over, including some asserts that other developers said "now you are just being silly, how can this assert not be true". Within hours we found tons of dormant bugs all over the place and two of the "silly" asserts were triggered.
Our bug count list went down by 50% within a week of asserting the code, and later on, in several occasions when some customers reported bugs all we had to do was run the instrumented, asserted version and the asserts caught the bug at once.
Using an owner instrument [such as AMEX] is a little more tricky. In that case, the cashier should make a cursory check to see if the signatures match, and may ask for ID, however, much more than that is placing liability back on the store instead of the Loss Prevention department of the bank or credit card company.
Actually afaik, AMEX explicitly tells the merchants not to check the signatures of their platinum and centurion customers. They believe that (a) such customers should not face the hassle of having their signature questioned and (b) their expert system will be better at flagging the fake purchase than the cashier will be at picking up the fake signature.
Question is, how much longer are they going to hold the award from Andrew Wiles of Fermat fame?
Game theory? It came out of the Rand institute type research, with applications in mind from day one. The seminal paper was by Morgenstern who was an economist, and von Neumann who was a mathematician, physicist and computer scientist.
If math was directed by practical applications,
Actually, for most of its lifetime, math has been directed by practical applications. Almost all distinguished mathematicians before the XX century were also top rate physicists.
People like Conway, Penrose and Witten are good examples.
Exchanging intra vendor data in XML is no more foolish than exchanging intra vendor data in ASCII or IEEE floating point format. It almost always makes a lot of sense. If, on the other hand, you happen to have the rare application that moves massive amounts of data around, sure, feel free not to use ASCII or XML, and use your own proprietary format. Just be aware that this is the exception, not the rule.
Processing takes place, the output is put into XML which is then parsed and stored on the database. What a waste of time and effort.
Yet again you miss the point. Exporting data in XML means that if you ever have a change of format or create a second consumer application it can readily understand the data. For example you can pass it to gecko and display the data. Try that with your propietary binary format.
Exchanging intra vendor data in XML is no more foolish than exchanging intra vendor data in ASCII. It almost always makes a lot of sense. If, on the other hand, you happen to have the rare application that moves massive amounts of data around, sure, feel free not to use ASCII or XML, and use your own proprietary format. Just be aware that this is the exception, not the rule.
It drives me up the wall, that my employer is using XML to let parts of their own application communicate with other parts. DTDs are not used and all parts still need to be modified/recompiled whenever one of them changes.
Then you are not using XML right. For one the format shouldn't be changing much, if it is clearly you guys are spending too much time coding and not enough thinking. Second any application that does not use the new attribute should be able to ignore it without any compilation change. Third, two thousand floating points ain't a giant string, unless you are programming an 8086 in Elbonia. Converting two thousand numbers to text should take 50 microseconds at the most.
why the hell does the end tag name have to be repeated?
Because that is the single biggest source of headaches in parsing SGML, the precursor of XML, in which such a construct is allowed.
It also makes error recovery very difficult, something that we know is quite important from all that malformed HTML code out there. The XML creators knew that too.
TB: I spent two years sitting on the Web consortium's technical architecture group, on the phone every week and face-to-face several times a year with Tim Berners-Lee. To this day, I remain fairly unconvinced of the core Semantic Web proposition.
Everyone who has actually done work on knowledge representation in the real world knows that this is a huge, difficult problem, unlikely to be solved anytime soon, as Tim Bray claims.
The only people who claim otherwise are either frauds or ignorant. The Semantic Web initiative has both: Tim Berners-Lee is very smart, but not a computer scientist, so he's not aware of the size of the challenge, plus he's a genuinely nice person, so he tends to trust others too much.
He has surrounded himself with the snake oil AI salesmen from the early 1980s who had promised us impending ubiquitous intelligent computers. Those fraudsters got found out back then, and spent the next fifteen years in academic limbo, only to be rescued by Tim Berners-Lee naivete.
Try making sense of your "compact binary config files" when something goes wrong, or when you want to port the config to a different application.
Yes, CPU cycles are cheap. CPUs sit idle over 90% of the time, even when there is a user in front of it. Spending the extra power processing 10K properly tagged files that are compatible across platforms rather than incompatible binary files is one of the best uses of raw CPU power we had.
Oh please, this does not qualify as "hacking." In fact, it is a time-honored way of navigating poorly-designed websites.
True enough. Just the other day I was clicking on a list of items on a web page and one link was broken. I noticed that the URL pattern was item1.html, item2.html, and so on and that the broken link read itme6.html (sic).
I manually edited the URL to read item6.html and voila' I got the page. Is that hacking? I think not. If all the students did was editing the URL, I do not think they should be punished. IF on the other hand they had to enter someone else's password then I say: fry 'em!
it was a science company, the heir to the great bell labs, and it got rid of its scientists!
So did AT&T and Arno Penzias (Nobel Prize winner) well before Carly. Cutting scientist started in the late 80s, so she would have hardly stood out for letting people go.
Nobody really thought Carly was topdrawer.
I think you are misremembering things post-facto. I knew about Carly well before she got named HP CEO. Where did I hear from her? in the trade press (Forbes, Fortune, Computer World, Business Week) where she was given fawning profiles.
Nothing specific about thieves. I have also pointed out in this thread Al Dunlap and Gil Amelio as two incompetent CEOs who looked at first like they were up to the task, but in the end were equal failures, and no one blames those on them being males either.
By blaming her incompetence on gender issues when it was simply all about incompetence the previous post made a sexist claim.
That is why I said "seemingly done a good job at Lucent". We now know she failed there too, but back then it looked like she did fine.
The same happened with Gil Amelio at Fairchild Semiconductors. While he was there everything looked hunky dory, but after he left it was clear the supposed turnaround wasn't there and neither did he turn around Apple.