The correct spelling of "honour", "colour" etc. is clearly given in the ENGLISH dictionary, The words "honor" etc. are not English, but "American", Mr. Webster and his ilk have a lot to answer for, especially their failure to use "Z" in words such as enterprize.
For example in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001.[4] The date the vulnerability was first found by an attacker is not known; however, the vulnerability window in this case could have been up to 7 years.
Looks like we've known about this for quite some time
As a proud UK subject (we are NOT citizens), I don't understand the lack of "social belonging" that is shown by so many colonists posters. Is it because by starting with an illegal act and armed uprising the conspiracy of "founding fathers" set a precedent which is still followed by this generation, or is it because a mongrel mix of immigrants from minority cults and diverse cultures has failed to form a cohesive "nation". The police force should be seen as an integral part of society, and respected as defending the values of it. You claim to be democratic republic, so either you have the laws and constabulary that a majority wants, or you have failed to use your votes to that end. If you admit that the majority of your society is happy with the current policing policy, but are personally against it, then you should either accept the will of the majority as the cost of the (other) benefits of citizenship (while using your freedom to try and persuade your fellow voters to change that policy), or give up that citizenship and emigrate. If your claim is that the majority of the electorate do not agree with the current policy, then I do not understand how that could come about unless your republic is not democratic. As a bystander, I acknowledge that I have no right to criticize, but I would like to understand.
I have to agree, I like slashdot a lot, because lots of what we get comes from minorities, and they are where amusing / interesting / insightful ideas generally arise. It gives me a place to express my opinion, which frankly is as weird as you get. A theist, techy, old hacker who started when assembly code was a new tool, and still believes in SSADM (structured system analysis and design methodology) and thinks gun control is good and capital punishment is necessary. In my mind, the most important aspect of the "new media" is the bi-directional nature of the beast. I strongly support free speech, and I like moderation schemes like ours (even if the urge to join in has to be suppressed in favour of "doing ones share"). There are a few times I get annoyed by the number of AC posts, but I suppose that is part of the price we pay for giving minorities a hearing. Now I know that the Jeff Bates was equating the slashdot community with "a minority", and I am talking about minorities within that, but I think "as below so above" applies, and I expect that model will be applied to many other groups as more people get used to the idea of posting thanks to sites like Fbook but want more "substance". Keep up the good work and happy birthday!
Just checked on Amazon Brother MFCJ5910DW Printer (Print/Scan/Copy/Fax)
Price: £98.32 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions Not quite the same beast, but ink system is available at £30 Total cost about £130 or $210 If your Grandma is called Moses, then that's just what she needs.:) Seriously, I replaced one A4 HP monochrome laser and two HP inkjets with one wirelessly networked printer which I could locate in the kitchen (easy to keep an eye on it, and that's where the coffee is kept). My model has two big paper trays and I can print a couple of hundred sheets before I have to "attend" to it. The ink tanks are clear, so I can check the levels as I walk past, and it's only a minute to pour some more ink in if needed. Full tank is 80 ml, or about four times what you get in a cartridge, so I never run out in the middle of a print run. To be honest, the A3 scanner is rarely needed, and I don't have or want a fax. You can get ink system for most Epson printers so I guess you can probably get a similar set up with one of them, but I can only report my own experience, and that's with the Brother. A few people have bought similar set ups after seeing mine, and all are happy with the results. As for picking up paper at an electronics store, you must be mad! Office supply if you want "photocopy" standard, but for decent prints to go on the wall in a frame you need acid free, Thank god Amazon does both, especially for those of us in rural areas. It is a major outing for me to go to my nearest "electronics store", takes at least an hour each way.
Yes most people don't put effort into printing, and boy does it show.
There are many reasons why I print my own pictures, cost being one factor, but artistic control of the process (especially in the use of "special" paper which a commercial printer could not use cost effectively) is more important. I use a Brother DCP 6690 CW printer fitted with a continuous ink supply system (think long range tanks) and I buy ink by the litre. The main cost for me is paper, and hand made 200gsm A3 paper is very expensive. For most work I use water colour paper and that runs to about £5 for 12 sheets of 10" by 14" depending on finish. Now translating this to 3D printing, I can see the use for "craftsman standard" devices in the production of intaglio or relief decoration and items such as masks, plaques etc., especially if I can apply true colour (24 bit) to the surface. I don't believe that current devices are capable of producing such items to the required standard of finish, but hope that they soon will. I think that we need to stop thinking about duplicating existing objects and see the technology as a means of producing novel products or novel forms designed to take advantage of the characteristics of the device, and especially to the production of "one off" or very limited "editions". How about a specially designed dinner service for that crucial business lunch?
No amount of comments can replace full and proper design and implementation documentation. In fact the best comments are links to these documents. And don't go on about waste of time producing such documents, in over fourty years in the business I've seen plenty of evidence to support my view. Modern IDEs make it easy to update design and implementation notes and keep linked versions of these and the code in step, and multiple screens make it easy to have all relevant information in view at the same time. Now get off my lawn and take your badly designed, badly written, and probably irrelevantly commented code away from my system.
Yes, I do RTFA. My point was that I represent a category with sane reasons to volunteer. The category will still exist in ten years, although sadly none of the people that now belong to it.
In spite of all of the posts implying that any volunteers must be "insane", I would be quite willing to go, for the reasons below. The important thing is that they are reasons, i.e. I am sane and have thought about them logically. I am unlikely to live more than 5 to 10 years more even if I stay on earth, in fact reduced gravity might give me longer. I have a good knowledge of science and engineering and a practical turn of mind that could let me make a real contribution to the project. I, like most humans, would like to have a chance to "make a mark" and leave a lasting memory, so what better than "third man on Mars"? I have had a good life, and worked on some interesting projects, but other than/. all I can do now is "play". I help a few local organisations with IT related tech, but I would love to do "meaningful" work again. Don't tell me about Open Source projects, unless of course you are a planning an SST:), I am just not interested enough in the content of projects I've seen. A Mars colony, now that has to be a good gig. Now for the bad news. I probably would not be acceptable as a candidate because of my health problems. I have limited mobility and have already received a "life time doze" in radiation therapy, I do not rely on drugs, but I have a restricted diet which might cause problems in supply and/or production. I am probably too old, and although I see this as "having good experience with limited technology", some might see me as "past it". And finally the game stopper. I don't think I would make interesting TV. I am not "handsome" (downright ugly is closer), I am straight, but the fires burn very low (it's true, I'm old:( ), so no romantic lead for me. I get along with most people (guess we wouldn't be likely to have a young earther along), so probably no exciting arguments, I am British and white , so no points for ethnic origin. And I have no dependents, so no back story, no family problems to pull the heart strings. All in all then I guess I'm not going to get the trip, and the real sad thing is that I have a feeling that many if not most of those who would go and would have sane reasons for doing so, fall into the same category. Catch 23?
No worship, just admiration. The point about Turing machines is that Babbage didn't know he'd designed one. Although it's possible that Ada had an inkling about the "universality" thing which is what the great man was first to understand. As for the software problems we face today, and the "parallelism crisis", there is nothing in Turing's work which can be blamed for these, or are you blaming him for not working on these? Computation is not the same as IT, and failure to understand that may well be the root cause of the poor standards of program design we see today. In fact I am saddened by the thought that even some of the people praising Turing fail to grasp his real gift to us, the fundamental theorem on the unsolvability of the halting problem.
I faced this very question right at the start of my IT career, in 1968. I had been absolutely against arms manufacture, but was given a chance to move from chemistry/thermodynamics (working in the development of domestic gas burners) to a programming job in aerospace. I have loved aeroplanes since I was 5, an avid SF reader, and going from a "budget" of 30 minutes of mainframe time per week (that was FORTRAN so included compile, test, run) to being 100% programming in technical problems was like being invited to the best party ever. I was going to have to accept a small pay cut, but that didn't matter a bit. Then I realized that every line of code would be used for military aircraft as much or more than for civil projects. It was a long night of the soul, but I decided to take the job. I am so glad I did, not least because I found that most of the military people (real aircrew) were the real anti-war guys. They were the ones most concerned about reducing "collateral damage", and pushing for more accurate delivery of - well - death. I think we did a good job. Today's wars are still terrible, but compared with conflicts such as WW2 they are actually more controlled, especially when hi-tech systems are used. I am older and wiser now, and doubt that we will ever see an end to war, but I do believe that armed conflict is getting "cleaner", at least when developed countries are involved. If we get more precise systems then we should be able to bring conflicts to a quicker end, with less damage to civilian areas and the environment. So my advice is to reflect on the outcome of improving technology by better simulation and then decide on each job offer as it comes. This is true whatever area you look at, the arms industry is investing in "non-lethal" systems, the drug companies in simulation and "in vitro" testing, so both of these provide chances for really good jobs in which you can make a positive difference to the world. I suspect that this might lose me some karma, but I think that gaming is probably the least ethical area (killing things should never be fun, even in a virtual world), and I personally would never work in the financial sector, but then that's the ethical dilemma we all face.
To quote from Wikipedia Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
The use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a predictor of job success has not been supported in studies,[15][16] and its use for this purpose is expressly discouraged in the Manual.[17]
Another case of HR pretending to have a scientific basis for predicting job fit to a profile, and totally missing the point of the original question. Presumably these guys know how to get the sales people they need, but realize that they need to speak the language of their customers.
I would suggest that the best way to train sales staff for any technical product is to take the best communicator from your technical staff and get him (or her) to run a regular seminar on the product, explaining the kind of problem the product is designed to solve and how the customers are likely to use it. Over a shortish time, the seminars will get better and you might even find that involving more techies actually improves the sales and the product.
There have been many cultures in which the "uniqueness" of everything is way more important than the idea of grouping like things together in "sets". To then add "ordering" on to that concept would be entirely foreign. A narrative is not an "ordered" set of statements, rather a continuum of expression. I think that "sets" is an idea which requires a "discrete" approach to the world, which does not arise in cultures from "steady state" environments in which every day is the same as yesterday.
I don't follow the reasoning that "sets are impossible to define in a non circular manner" implies "sets are intuitive". And even if they are intuitive, that doesn't imply that the cardinality of sets is also intuitive.
I for one have not stopped caring about the problem of numbers, and I am sure I am not alone. It's not a problem that sees much in the way of publication, probably because there hasn't been that much progress and it's not a study likely to get your Phd. It's the sort of problem that sits on the back burner until some genius comes up with a new insight. Part of the problem with this thread is that there are different meanings being attached to the symbol "number". The "1" in 1 sheep is probably intuitive, the 1 in {0,1} is probably not, yet both might reasonably be called "numbers". As for the "number line", I think that "things laid out in a line to see how many I've got" is innate, and may even be so for animals such as cats and birds. Naming the thing at any point in that row by the "number" that I count to get there seems to be a level of abstraction which requires "teaching".
That depends on your definition of proof, and of the system of logic being used. A simple (simplistic?) binary logic may produce a domain in which proofs are either true or false but not both, whilst a more interesting logic may suggest that a proof ( or any statement) is either true, false, true and false, neither true nor false, or not determinable. Using such a logic (or any other consistent set of states) is perfectly valid maths, and can give rise to some interesting results, in fact some of these even turn out to be of use to physicists and other students of the "real world", even though a "real" mathematician is disinterested in such mundane matters. Applied maths is just what it says on the box - the (often unwarranted) process of assigning "real world" measurements to mathematical structures and then taking the result of a mathematical operation on those structures and interpreting the values as though they applied to the "real world". In fact I also disagree with your statement defining maths as an abstract set of axioms and rules, which seems to me to cover only part of the game. There is such a thing as mathematical "elegance", which most mathematicians would recognize as integral to the game, but which I cannot easily define - just that some systems are more "elegant" than others. I suspect that all human maths is "blinkered" by our nature (primates - carbon based - etc.) and would not be surprised if a different kind of mind produced a maths which we could not easily comprehend. If you are interested in maths, you should really try to read Russel's Principia - but take care - the game of maths is much more addictive than any video nasty.
The UK will continue to exist. Scotland will probably not become a republic, but the Kingdom will include two independent countries, one principality and the province of Northern Ireland. The crown was united long before the parliaments. There would be no problem in creating a shared "British" military, in fact the usual designation is "British armed forces". Don't forget, once independence is in place, there will be a brand new political landscape in Scotland, without the unifying theme of "independence", the SNP might well fragment over other issues.
I live about 30 miles south of the border, and strongly believe that we should become part of Scotland until we can re-establish the kingdom of Northumbria with a king at Bamburgh. We will then demand compensation from the english for all the coal and iron they stole and take the Australian Government to court for copyright infringement by the Sydney bridge which is a blatent copy of our bridge over the Tyne.
This is beginning to worry me as well. I have several machines on a network and a 500GB external drive. A lot of my files are my own work including a lot of video which I would really not like to lose. So far I have made 1 copy of everything on DVD, but I am not happy with that, especially as I now have found that DVD-R seems to have a shelf life, as discs that I could read now seem to have errors, although this could be down to drive issues. I would love to get off site storage using an on-line system, but it would swamp my broadband just to get the current files saved, and I think BT would look askance at me maxing out my upload bandwidth for hours on end to cope with the backlog. I recently put a 200GB drive out of a broken laptop into a USB case and I am putting some files on that, but given its history I cannot really trust it. I do wonder if some of the old tricks of using a VHS tape might be worth looking at again, at least they are cheap and I think that if proper storage conditions are available they would have decent life. I once thought that files that came from the net didn't need to be backed up, but I am now finding that some files are no longer there, dead web sites or "new" versions which don't actually have the same content. So this is going to make things worse as every file I really like or use is going to have to be held locally. For me this is just a matter of entertainment or hobby interest, so I cannot justify (or afford) a high cost tech fix for the problem, but perhaps we have found a niche market for a low cost / true archive quality storage device for home use>
2 > profit ! so all we need is step 1 > invent device.
Back in the day, when a "small" project, suitable to be given to a young designer as a first solo flight, was anything less than six man months of effort, and was scheduled for use sometime next year, and a "big" project was at least 60 man years and needed next year and for the following 10 years, the budget allocation would be roughly 40% design, 40% testing and documentation, and 20% coding. The systems analysis and design tasks included choosing the right tools for the project. Sometimes the chosen strategy would be a mixture of languages (especially when the project needed different sub-systems on different platforms), sometimes the choice of documentation tool would be much more important than the code language. If user documentation was going to be extensive, then a full typesetting tool would be used, if not a simple text editor with hand drawn diagrams might be sufficient for IT staff. In any case, the final design stage would be to produce pseudo code for every module/function and a dictionary of every variable to be used (including a methodology for naming local temporary variables). Only then would coding begin, sometimes done by the same people who had done the design, sometimes not. In that environment, FORTRAN, COBOL,Algol had one important advantage - they were available. In fact we used a language called RTL/2 for many programs on DEC minis, because it had good access to assembler for time critical functions and special I/O to some of our exotic peripherals. We used COBOL on VAXen and ICL and IBM mainframes, for database access and fancy output, and FORTRAN where engineers from non IT departments needed to specify and/or understand a function. Assembly level code was still needed on most jobs, simply to get run times within acceptable limits. So what makes a language popular? Who with? I hate writing COBOL, but doing the SAME JOB in C++ would be even worse. I love C++ but making the source readable to a user is a non starter for anything more complicated than Hello World, and that has to be explained. I think the whole thread is confused over popular, widely used, and readily available. A language might be popular with coders for reasons such as "coolness", future employment prospects, and dare I say it laziness, while the same language might be detested by the IT manager who has to squeeze more mips out of the same hardware. As for the users, they just shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion! The very idea of interactive coding fills me with horror, how the hell do you test it. Is this where all of the security holes and resource leaks are coming from? Measure twice, cut once. and get off my lawn.
I have programmed professionally in more than 30 languages including machine codes, assemblers, FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, C,C++, lisp, Prolog, and a variety of "4GL"s. I have used Java and Python since retirement and I can say one thing for sure about them all. Choose the right one for the job and you're half way done, choose (or be forced into) the wrong one and you you are going to pay for it in blood, sweat and eventually tears. On at least two projects (each being more than 50 man years of design and coding effort) it was worth devising a new language with a syntax suited to the problem and writing the compiler. For some jobs, readability of the code by non IT staff can give a huge payoff, for others raw performance is the only criteria. Real time interaction with physical systems usually needs a "lower" level, C or even assembler, Complex data requires object orientated structures and for once off "need it today" jobs, Java might be the answer. Maintainability brings another load of constraints, as does the intended "longevity" of the project, and don't get me started on the whole domain of "proof of correctness". It is very easy to forget that a language is just a tool. If you only have a hammer you will find screwing a problem, but then you are reading this on slashdot.
A professional follows standards appropriate to the job in hand. Coding is but one step in the process of creating software, and not more or less important than the others. Any job needs a design stage, the output of which is documentation. Some jobs need very detailed design stages, possibly including pseudo code. Every job needs an implementation stage, this should include documentation as to why a particular method or structure is used. Every job needs a testing stage. Even the smallest job should specify a minimal test data set. Mission (or life) critical systems should specify a test environment which covers the whole envelope of parameters / states which the software is expected to handle ( that is not the same as expected to meet). Every job needs a sign-off stage. Self certification should only be used for very simple jobs, and even then should include a statement by the designer/programmer/tester(s) that the stages have been done, or why in this case they have been skipped or are continuing at the same time s release. Yes it does happen even in the best shops, but for Turin's sake write it down, and insist on it being done before further change to the affected software. In a really good shop, with a proper development environment which includes source code locking and version management, stage completion certificates should form part of the build dependency tree. If you are a manager of a shop which does not have such standards, then it is your professional duty to implement a scheme which allows you to certify that software that you release is fit for purpose. If you have staff who will not or cannot work to such standards, then I suggest that you ask them to sign a release form in which they accept personal responsibility for any failure. If they are willing to sign that, then you should be able to persuade them that proper design documentation is a good way to cover their asses. If you are a "coder" in a shop without proper standards, then are you a professional? If you are you will set up your own scheme and stick to it. Carrots, sticks, medals and back patting may have their place in life, but if you want to be in a profession, then standards are an inevitable component of the job. That's what profession means.
Encourage your staff and your peers to follow standards, and get involved with developing local procedures which help you to produce software fit for purpose (and that is not just fit for release). Now get off,my lawn, I have to finish documenting a load of COBOL before I can get out of purgatory.
Slashdot Mirror
Very free. No fees at all.
UK state funded directly rather than via local government.
As opposed to "private" schools where parents pay fees.
The correct spelling of "honour", "colour" etc. is clearly given in the ENGLISH dictionary, The words "honor" etc. are not English, but "American", Mr. Webster and his ilk have a lot to answer for, especially their failure to use "Z" in words such as enterprize.
From Wikipedia zero day exploit
For example in 2008 Microsoft confirmed a vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which affected some versions that were released in 2001.[4] The date the vulnerability was first found by an attacker is not known; however, the vulnerability window in this case could have been up to 7 years.
Looks like we've known about this for quite some time
As a proud UK subject (we are NOT citizens), I don't understand the lack of "social belonging" that is shown by so many colonists posters. Is it because by starting with an illegal act and armed uprising the conspiracy of "founding fathers" set a precedent which is still followed by this generation, or is it because a mongrel mix of immigrants from minority cults and diverse cultures has failed to form a cohesive "nation".
The police force should be seen as an integral part of society, and respected as defending the values of it. You claim to be democratic republic, so either you have the laws and constabulary that a majority wants, or you have failed to use your votes to that end.
If you admit that the majority of your society is happy with the current policing policy, but are personally against it, then you should either accept the will of the majority as the cost of the (other) benefits of citizenship (while using your freedom to try and persuade your fellow voters to change that policy), or give up that citizenship and emigrate. If your claim is that the majority of the electorate do not agree with the current policy, then I do not understand how that could come about unless your republic is not democratic.
As a bystander, I acknowledge that I have no right to criticize, but I would like to understand.
I have to agree, I like slashdot a lot, because lots of what we get comes from minorities, and they are where amusing / interesting / insightful ideas generally arise. It gives me a place to express my opinion, which frankly is as weird as you get. A theist, techy, old hacker who started when assembly code was a new tool, and still believes in SSADM (structured system analysis and design methodology) and thinks gun control is good and capital punishment is necessary. In my mind, the most important aspect of the "new media" is the bi-directional nature of the beast. I strongly support free speech, and I like moderation schemes like ours (even if the urge to join in has to be suppressed in favour of "doing ones share").
There are a few times I get annoyed by the number of AC posts, but I suppose that is part of the price we pay for giving minorities a hearing.
Now I know that the Jeff Bates was equating the slashdot community with "a minority", and I am talking about minorities within that, but I think "as below so above" applies, and I expect that model will be applied to many other groups as more people get used to the idea of posting thanks to sites like Fbook but want more "substance".
Keep up the good work and happy birthday!
Just checked on Amazon
Brother MFCJ5910DW Printer (Print/Scan/Copy/Fax)
Price: £98.32 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
Not quite the same beast, but ink system is available at £30
Total cost about £130 or $210
If your Grandma is called Moses, then that's just what she needs.:)
Seriously, I replaced one A4 HP monochrome laser and two HP inkjets with one wirelessly networked printer which I could locate in the kitchen (easy to keep an eye on it, and that's where the coffee is kept). My model has two big paper trays and I can print a couple of hundred sheets before I have to "attend" to it. The ink tanks are clear, so I can check the levels as I walk past, and it's only a minute to pour some more ink in if needed. Full tank is 80 ml, or about four times what you get in a cartridge, so I never run out in the middle of a print run. To be honest, the A3 scanner is rarely needed, and I don't have or want a fax.
You can get ink system for most Epson printers so I guess you can probably get a similar set up with one of them, but I can only report my own experience, and that's with the Brother. A few people have bought similar set ups after seeing mine, and all are happy with the results.
As for picking up paper at an electronics store, you must be mad! Office supply if you want "photocopy" standard, but for decent prints to go on the wall in a frame you need acid free, Thank god Amazon does both, especially for those of us in rural areas. It is a major outing for me to go to my nearest "electronics store", takes at least an hour each way.
Yes most people don't put effort into printing, and boy does it show.
There are many reasons why I print my own pictures, cost being one factor, but artistic control of the process (especially in the use of "special" paper which a commercial printer could not use cost effectively) is more important. I use a Brother DCP 6690 CW printer fitted with a continuous ink supply system (think long range tanks) and I buy ink by the litre. The main cost for me is paper, and hand made 200gsm A3 paper is very expensive. For most work I use water colour paper and that runs to about £5 for 12 sheets of 10" by 14" depending on finish.
Now translating this to 3D printing, I can see the use for "craftsman standard" devices in the production of intaglio or relief decoration and items such as masks, plaques etc., especially if I can apply true colour (24 bit) to the surface. I don't believe that current devices are capable of producing such items to the required standard of finish, but hope that they soon will.
I think that we need to stop thinking about duplicating existing objects and see the technology as a means of producing novel products or novel forms designed to take advantage of the characteristics of the device, and especially to the production of "one off" or very limited "editions". How about a specially designed dinner service for that crucial business lunch?
No amount of comments can replace full and proper design and implementation documentation. In fact the best comments are links to these documents. And don't go on about waste of time producing such documents, in over fourty years in the business I've seen plenty of evidence to support my view. Modern IDEs make it easy to update design and implementation notes and keep linked versions of these and the code in step, and multiple screens make it easy to have all relevant information in view at the same time.
Now get off my lawn and take your badly designed, badly written, and probably irrelevantly commented code away from my system.
Yes, I do RTFA. My point was that I represent a category with sane reasons to volunteer. The category will still exist in ten years, although sadly none of the people that now belong to it.
In spite of all of the posts implying that any volunteers must be "insane", I would be quite willing to go, for the reasons below. The important thing is that they are reasons, i.e. I am sane and have thought about them logically. /. all I can do now is "play". I help a few local organisations with IT related tech, but I would love to do "meaningful" work again. Don't tell me about Open Source projects, unless of course you are a planning an SST :), I am just not interested enough in the content of projects I've seen. A Mars colony, now that has to be a good gig. :( ), so no romantic lead for me. I get along with most people (guess we wouldn't be likely to have a young earther along), so probably no exciting arguments, I am British and white , so no points for ethnic origin. And I have no dependents, so no back story, no family problems to pull the heart strings.
I am unlikely to live more than 5 to 10 years more even if I stay on earth, in fact reduced gravity might give me longer.
I have a good knowledge of science and engineering and a practical turn of mind that could let me make a real contribution to the project. I, like most humans, would like to have a chance to "make a mark" and leave a lasting memory, so what better than "third man on Mars"?
I have had a good life, and worked on some interesting projects, but other than
Now for the bad news. I probably would not be acceptable as a candidate because of my health problems. I have limited mobility and have already received a "life time doze" in radiation therapy, I do not rely on drugs, but I have a restricted diet which might cause problems in supply and/or production.
I am probably too old, and although I see this as "having good experience with limited technology", some might see me as "past it".
And finally the game stopper. I don't think I would make interesting TV. I am not "handsome" (downright ugly is closer), I am straight, but the fires burn very low (it's true, I'm old
All in all then I guess I'm not going to get the trip, and the real sad thing is that I have a feeling that many if not most of those who would go and would have sane reasons for doing so, fall into the same category. Catch 23?
No worship, just admiration. The point about Turing machines is that Babbage didn't know he'd designed one. Although it's possible that Ada had an inkling about the "universality" thing which is what the great man was first to understand.
As for the software problems we face today, and the "parallelism crisis", there is nothing in Turing's work which can be blamed for these, or are you blaming him for not working on these?
Computation is not the same as IT, and failure to understand that may well be the root cause of the poor standards of program design we see today. In fact I am saddened by the thought that even some of the people praising Turing fail to grasp his real gift to us, the fundamental theorem on the unsolvability of the halting problem.
(Retired IT worker & savings) = FALSE
No more to say
I faced this very question right at the start of my IT career, in 1968. I had been absolutely against arms manufacture, but was given a chance to move from chemistry/thermodynamics (working in the development of domestic gas burners) to a programming job in aerospace. I have loved aeroplanes since I was 5, an avid SF reader, and going from a "budget" of 30 minutes of mainframe time per week (that was FORTRAN so included compile, test, run) to being 100% programming in technical problems was like being invited to the best party ever. I was going to have to accept a small pay cut, but that didn't matter a bit. Then I realized that every line of code would be used for military aircraft as much or more than for civil projects. It was a long night of the soul, but I decided to take the job. I am so glad I did, not least because I found that most of the military people (real aircrew) were the real anti-war guys. They were the ones most concerned about reducing "collateral damage", and pushing for more accurate delivery of - well - death.
I think we did a good job. Today's wars are still terrible, but compared with conflicts such as WW2 they are actually more controlled, especially when hi-tech systems are used. I am older and wiser now, and doubt that we will ever see an end to war, but I do believe that armed conflict is getting "cleaner", at least when developed countries are involved. If we get more precise systems then we should be able to bring conflicts to a quicker end, with less damage to civilian areas and the environment.
So my advice is to reflect on the outcome of improving technology by better simulation and then decide on each job offer as it comes. This is true whatever area you look at, the arms industry is investing in "non-lethal" systems, the drug companies in simulation and "in vitro" testing, so both of these provide chances for really good jobs in which you can make a positive difference to the world.
I suspect that this might lose me some karma, but I think that gaming is probably the least ethical area (killing things should never be fun, even in a virtual world), and I personally would never work in the financial sector, but then that's the ethical dilemma we all face.
To quote from Wikipedia
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
The use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a predictor of job success has not been supported in studies,[15][16] and its use for this purpose is expressly discouraged in the Manual.[17]
Another case of HR pretending to have a scientific basis for predicting job fit to a profile, and totally missing the point of the original question. Presumably these guys know how to get the sales people they need, but realize that they need to speak the language of their customers.
I would suggest that the best way to train sales staff for any technical product is to take the best communicator from your technical staff and get him (or her) to run a regular seminar on the product, explaining the kind of problem the product is designed to solve and how the customers are likely to use it. Over a shortish time, the seminars will get better and you might even find that involving more techies actually improves the sales and the product.
There have been many cultures in which the "uniqueness" of everything is way more important than the idea of grouping like things together in "sets". To then add "ordering" on to that concept would be entirely foreign. A narrative is not an "ordered" set of statements, rather a continuum of expression. I think that "sets" is an idea which requires a "discrete" approach to the world, which does not arise in cultures from "steady state" environments in which every day is the same as yesterday.
I don't follow the reasoning that "sets are impossible to define in a non circular manner" implies "sets are intuitive". And even if they are intuitive, that doesn't imply that the cardinality of sets is also intuitive.
I for one have not stopped caring about the problem of numbers, and I am sure I am not alone. It's not a problem that sees much in the way of publication, probably because there hasn't been that much progress and it's not a study likely to get your Phd. It's the sort of problem that sits on the back burner until some genius comes up with a new insight.
Part of the problem with this thread is that there are different meanings being attached to the symbol "number". The "1" in 1 sheep is probably intuitive, the 1 in {0,1} is probably not, yet both might reasonably be called "numbers". As for the "number line", I think that "things laid out in a line to see how many I've got" is innate, and may even be so for animals such as cats and birds. Naming the thing at any point in that row by the "number" that I count to get there seems to be a level of abstraction which requires "teaching".
That depends on your definition of proof, and of the system of logic being used. A simple (simplistic?) binary logic may produce a domain in which proofs are either true or false but not both, whilst a more interesting logic may suggest that a proof ( or any statement) is either true, false, true and false, neither true nor false, or not determinable. Using such a logic (or any other consistent set of states) is perfectly valid maths, and can give rise to some interesting results, in fact some of these even turn out to be of use to physicists and other students of the "real world", even though a "real" mathematician is disinterested in such mundane matters. Applied maths is just what it says on the box - the (often unwarranted) process of assigning "real world" measurements to mathematical structures and then taking the result of a mathematical operation on those structures and interpreting the values as though they applied to the "real world".
In fact I also disagree with your statement defining maths as an abstract set of axioms and rules, which seems to me to cover only part of the game. There is such a thing as mathematical "elegance", which most mathematicians would recognize as integral to the game, but which I cannot easily define - just that some systems are more "elegant" than others. I suspect that all human maths is "blinkered" by our nature (primates - carbon based - etc.) and would not be surprised if a different kind of mind produced a maths which we could not easily comprehend.
If you are interested in maths, you should really try to read Russel's Principia - but take care - the game of maths is much more addictive than any video nasty.
The UK will continue to exist. Scotland will probably not become a republic, but the Kingdom will include two independent countries, one principality and the province of Northern Ireland. The crown was united long before the parliaments.
There would be no problem in creating a shared "British" military, in fact the usual designation is "British armed forces".
Don't forget, once independence is in place, there will be a brand new political landscape in Scotland, without the unifying theme of "independence", the SNP might well fragment over other issues.
They were available, but our ancestors had enough sense to leave them alone.
I live about 30 miles south of the border, and strongly believe that we should become part of Scotland until we can re-establish the kingdom of Northumbria with a king at Bamburgh. We will then demand compensation from the english for all the coal and iron they stole and take the Australian Government to court for copyright infringement by the Sydney bridge which is a blatent copy of our bridge over the Tyne.
This is beginning to worry me as well. I have several machines on a network and a 500GB external drive. A lot of my files are my own work including a lot of video which I would really not like to lose. So far I have made 1 copy of everything on DVD, but I am not happy with that, especially as I now have found that DVD-R seems to have a shelf life, as discs that I could read now seem to have errors, although this could be down to drive issues.
I would love to get off site storage using an on-line system, but it would swamp my broadband just to get the current files saved, and I think BT would look askance at me maxing out my upload bandwidth for hours on end to cope with the backlog.
I recently put a 200GB drive out of a broken laptop into a USB case and I am putting some files on that, but given its history I cannot really trust it. I do wonder if some of the old tricks of using a VHS tape might be worth looking at again, at least they are cheap and I think that if proper storage conditions are available they would have decent life.
I once thought that files that came from the net didn't need to be backed up, but I am now finding that some files are no longer there, dead web sites or "new" versions which don't actually have the same content. So this is going to make things worse as every file I really like or use is going to have to be held locally.
For me this is just a matter of entertainment or hobby interest, so I cannot justify (or afford) a high cost tech fix for the problem, but perhaps we have found a niche market for a low cost / true archive quality storage device for home use>
2 > profit !
so all we need is step 1 > invent device.
Back in the day, when a "small" project, suitable to be given to a young designer as a first solo flight, was anything less than six man months of effort, and was scheduled for use sometime next year, and a "big" project was at least 60 man years and needed next year and for the following 10 years, the budget allocation would be roughly 40% design, 40% testing and documentation, and 20% coding. The systems analysis and design tasks included choosing the right tools for the project. Sometimes the chosen strategy would be a mixture of languages (especially when the project needed different sub-systems on different platforms), sometimes the choice of documentation tool would be much more important than the code language. If user documentation was going to be extensive, then a full typesetting tool would be used, if not a simple text editor with hand drawn diagrams might be sufficient for IT staff.
In any case, the final design stage would be to produce pseudo code for every module/function and a dictionary of every variable to be used (including a methodology for naming local temporary variables). Only then would coding begin, sometimes done by the same people who had done the design, sometimes not.
In that environment, FORTRAN, COBOL,Algol had one important advantage - they were available. In fact we used a language called RTL/2 for many programs on DEC minis, because it had good access to assembler for time critical functions and special I/O to some of our exotic peripherals. We used COBOL on VAXen and ICL and IBM mainframes, for database access and fancy output, and FORTRAN where engineers from non IT departments needed to specify and/or understand a function. Assembly level code was still needed on most jobs, simply to get run times within acceptable limits.
So what makes a language popular? Who with? I hate writing COBOL, but doing the SAME JOB in C++ would be even worse. I love C++ but making the source readable to a user is a non starter for anything more complicated than Hello World, and that has to be explained.
I think the whole thread is confused over popular, widely used, and readily available. A language might be popular with coders for reasons such as "coolness", future employment prospects, and dare I say it laziness, while the same language might be detested by the IT manager who has to squeeze more mips out of the same hardware. As for the users, they just shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion!
The very idea of interactive coding fills me with horror, how the hell do you test it. Is this where all of the security holes and resource leaks are coming from?
Measure twice, cut once. and get off my lawn.
I have programmed professionally in more than 30 languages including machine codes, assemblers, FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, C,C++, lisp, Prolog, and a variety of "4GL"s. I have used Java and Python since retirement and I can say one thing for sure about them all. Choose the right one for the job and you're half way done, choose (or be forced into) the wrong one and you you are going to pay for it in blood, sweat and eventually tears. On at least two projects (each being more than 50 man years of design and coding effort) it was worth devising a new language with a syntax suited to the problem and writing the compiler. For some jobs, readability of the code by non IT staff can give a huge payoff, for others raw performance is the only criteria. Real time interaction with physical systems usually needs a "lower" level, C or even assembler, Complex data requires object orientated structures and for once off "need it today" jobs, Java might be the answer. Maintainability brings another load of constraints, as does the intended "longevity" of the project, and don't get me started on the whole domain of "proof of correctness".
It is very easy to forget that a language is just a tool. If you only have a hammer you will find screwing a problem, but then you are reading this on slashdot.
A professional follows standards appropriate to the job in hand.
Coding is but one step in the process of creating software, and not more or less important than the others.
Any job needs a design stage, the output of which is documentation.
Some jobs need very detailed design stages, possibly including pseudo code.
Every job needs an implementation stage, this should include documentation as to why a particular method or structure is used.
Every job needs a testing stage. Even the smallest job should specify a minimal test data set. Mission (or life) critical systems should specify a test environment which covers the whole envelope of parameters / states which the software is expected to handle ( that is not the same as expected to meet).
Every job needs a sign-off stage. Self certification should only be used for very simple jobs, and even then should include a statement by the designer/programmer/tester(s) that the stages have been done, or why in this case they have been skipped or are continuing at the same time s release. Yes it does happen even in the best shops, but for Turin's sake write it down, and insist on it being done before further change to the affected software.
In a really good shop, with a proper development environment which includes source code locking and version management, stage completion certificates should form part of the build dependency tree.
If you are a manager of a shop which does not have such standards, then it is your professional duty to implement a scheme which allows you to certify that software that you release is fit for purpose. If you have staff who will not or cannot work to such standards, then I suggest that you ask them to sign a release form in which they accept personal responsibility for any failure. If they are willing to sign that, then you should be able to persuade them that proper design documentation is a good way to cover their asses.
If you are a "coder" in a shop without proper standards, then are you a professional? If you are you will set up your own scheme and stick to it.
Carrots, sticks, medals and back patting may have their place in life, but if you want to be in a profession, then standards are an inevitable component of the job. That's what profession means.
Encourage your staff and your peers to follow standards, and get involved with developing local procedures which help you to produce software fit for purpose (and that is not just fit for release). ,my lawn, I have to finish documenting a load of COBOL before I can get out of purgatory.
Now get off