It actually works for Canada. I plotted a route from my house to another Canadian city... no problems. It's just that the provinces are not delineated in the map. Mapping works fine.
The other problem with switching over to Dvorak is most common keyboard shortcuts aren't so convenient anymore. Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (or Cmd-C Cmd-V).
Most shortcuts are hard coded for QWERTY and would not make sense on a keyboard layout that is radically different from it.
I don't think so. Mac OS X comes with every new Macintosh and there are no exceptions. I don't think Apple will ever sell an OS-less machine.
The thing is, Apple makes both the OS and the hardware, so I'm guessing the bulk of the cost of the machine is hardware cost... and the bundled software, as they say, is pure gravy.
Besides, I personally believe $499+ isn't too much to pay for a Macintosh. But that's just me... my overall experience with Mac hardware has been pretty good and I think it's worth paying that little extra...
In a way, Apple hardware is kind of like Debian. It's not bleeding edge, but it's stable and it works. (the good aesthetics is unimportant to me. I don't mind it though.)
Incidentally, just FYI, you can actually add 3rd-party RAM to the Mini yourself without voiding the warranty. Take a look at this: Clearing up confusion about the Mac Mini
[quote] While it is strongly recommended that you only have an Apple Authorized Service Provider crack it open and install RAM, hard drives, Airport and Bluetooth, it will NOT void your warranty if you do it yourself. As is standard operating procedure, however, anything you break while attempting anything on your own is not Apple's responsibility and will not be covered under warranty. I think that is pretty much common sense.
Among other things, the Mac mini boots headless too.
If your scheduling problem can be quantified (i.e. expressed as an LP), you can use this to solve for the optimal schedule given all sorts of constraints.
1) Actually as far as books are concerned he should buy them in India and bring them over (or have his relatives ship them over). Most countries outside of North America sell international edition textbooks which are WAY cheaper than any used book you can get here (it's something like $18 for a book that would cost $150 new/$80 used on Amazon). Also I am told that in India the prices are usually even lower than standard international edition issues because they print on lousier paper or something.
(btw it's actually legal (or more correctly, not illegal) to ship international editions into the U.S.... google for the U.S. court ruling)
2) PowerPoint.... no comment. Some of us use LaTeX's slide mode. But whatever works for you.
3) Useful, but what is probably more useful is having a good relationship with people in your research group (who have already taken the courses you're taking). I find that face-to-face contact is more efficient than online contact, though maybe having both is best.
4) Agreed. Pack your own lunch. Campus food is too expensive... it'll eat away at your already measly stipend.
GAs are not typically efficient on their own... and while their solutions are usually better than the nominal case (with no optimization), those solutions don't always qualify as "optimal".
quote:
When to Use GAs
GAs treat the optimization problem as a black box, and are therefore very flexible. Because GAs use very little problem structure they will inevitably perform poorly relative to an algorithm which is is designed for a specific problem type. GAs are therefore best suited to messy problems which do not admit more conventional optimization schemes. GAs can also be hybridized with other solution methods so that aspects of a problem which are amenable to a solution are solved using specialized techniques.
I agree that science is more policitized than many people think. But let me just add my two cents worth regarding pseudo-"black box" methods.
One of the reasons Neural Networks were viewed with some doubt was because of their "pseudo-black box" nature. Train it enough and you will get a model that gives you a good fit for your data, but you have no insight as to interpret the results, not least because you will almost never get the same model twice from the same data (the weights will be different every time you train them).
The neural networks idea sounded interesting because of the "cool" biological analogue it has with neurons firing in your brain (and it had interesting jargon to boot).
But if you look at its mathematical description it boils down to doing a simple regression/curve fitting with a limited nonlinear model that uses exponential functions (known in the NN community as "activation functions") like the sigmoid etc. (You can actually derive this if you write out the equations for a simple 1-2 layer neural network).
It spits out data that fits the curve, but tells you nothing about the correlations inside them. In the 1980s, people were attracted to it because of its simplicity and the fact that it seemed to be feasible way of mimicking a human's pattern matching abilities. It was all the rage back then. In the 1990s or so, people started to become aware of its weaknesses and began to look at it more circumspectly.
To give you an example, most credit card companies use Neural Networks to approve credit card applications. They pump your application data through a trained model (based on past classifications done by humans), and it spits out an "Approved" or "Not Approved" flag.
Unfortunately, you have no idea why a certain application is approved or not approved. A neural network model can't tell you that. It's only designed to give you an answer based on the its training weights, i.e. it only models the relationship between Y and X, and not the Y and X spaces themselves.
Instead, if you apply a multivariate statistical method such as PLS (via a NIPALS algorithm), the model will tell you how things are correlated (in a easy to interpret graphical fashion). It will pretty much be doing the same thing as the neural network, except that it models the X and Y spaces simultaneously, compensates for missing data by deriving from the correlation structures; all this by transforming the variables into a latent variable space that captures the maximum covariance in the data. All the equations are transparent and have a solid basis in the mathematics of linear transformations and projections.
And you get the same model each time, so it can tell you exactly why your credit card application was turned down. (Too many unpaid bills, for instance)
It is easy to become enamored of black-box methods (I know I was), but ultimately the methods that survive are the ones built on rigorous mathematical/scientific foundations. (not always possible, especially in areas like economics, but it is something to strive for)
Most ideas and theories get superseded over time, but black-box methods and theories produce the most controversies. Sometimes you can't blame the community for being a little skeptical of them.
So many comments.... and nobody has realized that the article was talking about NATURAL PROGRAMMING and not NATURAL LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING (i.e. which to most of us conjures up notions of trying to make programming languages behave more English-like or employing belabored programming language structures that mirror common speech).
To my understanding, "Natural Programming" simply means a programming style that is suited to the way humans think ABOUT THEIR PROBLEM DOMAIN.
I like to use the example of dBASE and Paradox: the dBASE language (much like SQL) was an attempt at implementing a natural language programming syntax (it was the hot thing back then). It ended up being a language that was tedious and inefficient to write. (although it did have a cult following)
On the hand, the Paradox Application Language (before version 4.5 at least), was a succinct, concise and clear language -- it was a "natural language" for its problem domain (i.e. databases). One could slice and dice databases effortlessly with its built-in functions. The reason Paradox was called Paradox was just that: it was extremely capable of doing powerful and sophisticated stuff, and yet it was very easy to write and read.
Another example: When a human wants to iterate through a list, he thinks to himself "okay, let's run through this list from 1 to n".
In a language like C, he would have had to write this:
for (i = 1; i n; i++) {
dothis(); }
which involves assigning a number to a counter, checking a condition, and incrementing the counter. Kinda troublesome, right?
When in something like MATLAB, he could have just written:
Presumably he meant he was running Office 2k/XP on his Win32 laptop and has another copy on his own Apple (non-Microsoft?) machine (Office X maybe). Does the EULA cover that?
Are these proximity-type cards? Can RF-based proximity-card readers be used with terminals?
I use a proximity card to enter university buildings, and it takes less than 1 sec for the reader to read my card, find my record in the authorized personnel database, and unlock the door. Instantaneous.
UID/pw usually takes more than 1 sec -- it depends on the length of UID and pw, and how fast the person can type.
Re:Semi-serious?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I don't want to turn this into a debate, but I believe in critically analyzing the text we're reading. When reading the bible (like any other text), it is often useful to consider the entire context.
If you don't, then it is often possible to contrive any naïve and convenient conclusion, and then claim that's what the good book teaches when it doesn't.
Re your syllogism, it is a fallacy of the most rudimentary kind:
Eve eats fruit from tree of life to gain wisdom God punishes her Therefore Eve was punished for gaining wisdom?
Is that the only conclusion? Must it be? What kind of wisdom does the original Hebrew word talk about? What about other possibilities supporting facts? It is unfair to make any conclusion without considering these questions.
In reality, what most Christians are taught is this (now you may consider this "interpretation"): *God punished Eve for disobedience to his explicit command*. That's it. There are also issues of pride and rebellion, and supposition that one might be equal to God, but I won't get into those. I've made my point. Case closed.
I ran the style command (wasn't bundled with Mac OS X, so I had to compile it) on a P.G. Wodehouse text. I got the below results. Utterly preposterous--P.G. Wodehouse's command of the English language is unparalleled...
readability grades:
Kincaid: 5.1
ARI: 5.4
Coleman-Liau: 8.7
Flesch Index: 84.0
Fog Index: 8.2
Lix: 30.0 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 8.1 sentence info:
289566 characters
69688 words, average length 4.16 characters = 1.28 syllables
4799 sentences, average length 14.5 words
51% (2458) short sentences (at most 10 words)
13% (663) long sentences (at least 25 words)
1 paragraphs, average length 4799.0 sentences
5% (240) questions
39% (1888) passive sentences
longest sent 180 wds at sent 39; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 28 word usage:
verb types:
to be (2408) auxiliary (905)
types as % of total:
conjunctions 4(3043) pronouns 14(9464) prepositions 12(8414)
nominalizations 1(675) sentence beginnings:
pronoun (1825) interrogative pronoun (216) article (438)
subordinating conjunction (123) conjunction (235) preposition (218)
Well, it is actually true in Canada. The title Engineer is protected by law - it is illegal for anyone to misrepresent him/herself as an engineer without the proper qualifications. Most of people do it out of ignorance, but ignorance is no excuse.
Incidentally, graduate engineers (those who have completed a 4-year engineering degree) in Canada aren't allowed to use the title "engineer" either. They can only call themselves "junior engineer", up until they get professional certification from the provincial engineering body.
The term "engineer" is protected by provincial law. Sure, people can call themselves sanitation engineer or whatever they like, but they can't put that on their business card or job description title.
Perceived speed is actually quite important; from the perspective of a personal computer user, it is quite possibly more important than actual throughput. It influences a user's beliefs about his own productivity on the machine, which in turn affects actual productivity. I don't know about you, but on a machine where widgets just zip, I work faster... slow GUIs have the effect of insidiously slowing me down.
Somehow the responsiveness of the Panther UI leaves something to be desired. (I'm running OS X 10.3.4 on a 1GHz G4/768MB RAM)
It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish, and in some cases more sluggish than in Windows apps. High-end G5 Mac users probably don't notice it, but it is actually quite obvious on midrange Macs. One gets used to it, of course, and very soon one ceases to be bothered by it--but one cannot help but feel it when one uses a Windows machine at work.
John Siracusa at ArsTechnica actually did an informal test (on scrolling and such, somewhere in this review) and recorded the results in a Quicktime movie file. He compared the speed of Cocoa controls to Win32 controls.
This is also evident if you compare Cocoa to X11. Even the UI in X11 apps running under OS X is more responsive than Cocoa, especially in scrolling. I'm not entirely sure why this is but some people attribute it to overheads in Cocoa.
In my own experience, I have come to the (unscientific) conclusion that for now, Windows apps do seem more responsive than Mac OS X apps on comparable machines (1GHz G4/768MB RAM vis-a-vis a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4/256MB RAM). That doesn't mean the Win32 apps are actually faster, mind you, just that their UIs feel that way. This would one area where Apple could make improvements on, and I think it will.
P.S. Having said all that, Mac OS X has many productivity enhancing features that compensate for its UI sluggishness: robust and fast multitasking, extensive keyboard control, aesthetically pleasant UI, automation capabailities, exceptionally well-designed tools, creatively crafted free apps (like Butler and Tofu) from the community etc. Yes, I cannot deny that I am actually more productive and creative in je ne sais quoi ways on my Mac than on Windows.... for the most part, it's just more pleasant to work on a Mac.
I use NetNewsWire Lite, and it's pretty good. I set Safari to open links in New tabs, so all I have to do in NNWlite is to press the right arrow button on an article, and press "+" to jump to the next unread article.
The only problem with NNWlite is that it does not recognize OPML groups. You have to recreate your groups if you're importing an OPML file.
If you want a more advanced FREE (well, donationware) newsreader, NewsMac is a good choice. Here.
I've tried RSSOwl (Java) but I didn't like it. On XP, I used SharpReader (a free.NET app) and I believe it is one of the best FREE RSS readers on that platform. The only downside is that it is a little sluggish becauses it uses the IE component for HTML display and there is some overhead calling COM from.NET.
IMHO, just going off an a tangent: I think many of us have been misled. Something else is quietly brewing.
The stagnation of IE has been made to be seen as a bigger issue than it really is. We see Firefox making headway now and we are happy, but in reality, from a strategic point of view, it is no threat to IE in the long run unless it makes some fundamental changes.
If Microsoft gets its way, the fight is no longer going to be about rendering web pages.
I submit to you that this is due to.NET. Detractors may deride it as much as they want, but I believe this Microsoft's strategic weapon. Imagine a browser that can run a native lightweight UI (through Avalon). Imagine a world where such applications are trivial to build.
Right now, today, we are already beginning to see things like WYSIWYG HTML editors built with ASP.NET, that work like a native application embedded within the browser. (take a look at this, Devedit. Requires IE.
One might argue that we can sort of already do such things using XUL, Javascript, DHTML, Java etc. That's all nice and well, but how many technologies do you have to learn to build a simple app?
With.NET, your knowledge in a.NET language like C# (and even your code!) can more or less be reused in ASP.NET, and in frameworks like.NET Compact.
This was the dream everyone had for Java, and from the way things are going, it looks like this dream will come in to fruition in the form of.NET..NET just works, for the most part. You can actually build usable GUI apps with it (unlike Java. The only decent GUI apps are SWT-based and even those feel klunky). And it will be interesting to see how things will look like in a few years.
(btw, I am no MS supporter (my main machine is a Mac OS X box). But I have to admire the.NET architecture -- which incidentally, was not conceived by Microsoft so much as it was by Anders Heijsberg who was pilfered from Borland. You can see the elegance of Borland engineering exude in.NET. Yes, I am a Borland fan.)
Whoa, let's not be presumptuous here. It's easy for the man on the street to think that Apple should do this or that... but you have to consider the economics.
Apple does not traditionally target the ultra low-end market for a couple of reasons. For one, they're not big enough. I believe this came up in a discussion comparing Dell and Apple, and cheap PCs. Dell has the manufacturing facilities and [vastly superior] distribution channels to handle a high-volume low-margin market. Apple does not. Just look at the problems they're having churning out enough $249 iPod Minis for the U.S. market (btw, because of production problems, us chaps in Canada still can't buy iPod minis; they're only coming out Jul 24 over here).
Second, Apple has a reputation of making innovative products. It charges a premium for it. It just doesn't do assembly like Dell does; it also does industrial design. That's why iPods are well-liked and perceived to be cool. When it comes down to it, it's just a digital music player with really good design. Someone had to pay for the industrial design and marketing (not free, you know).
In short, Apple just doesn't seem like that kind of company that thrives on products that just barely breaking even. It can't survive in that market.
p.s. Steve Jobs has said that they're working to make cheaper iPods. But don't expect any $100 ones any time soon.
I think it's just a case of their phrasing being misleading.
I believe they mean that 1) Windows is not as insecure as YOU THINK 2) Mac OS X is not as secure as YOU THINK (they assume Mac OS X users think that the operating system has 0 to few exploits)
They're not really saying that Windows is more secure than Mac OS X. But the way the said it -- well, sure could mislead a lot of people.
Slashdot Mirror
It actually works for Canada. I plotted a route from my house to another Canadian city... no problems. It's just that the provinces are not delineated in the map. Mapping works fine.
The video is somewhere near the bottom of this page.
It's pretty cool.
Apple commercials
The other problem with switching over to Dvorak is most common keyboard shortcuts aren't so convenient anymore.
Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (or Cmd-C Cmd-V).
Most shortcuts are hard coded for QWERTY and would not make sense on a keyboard layout that is radically different from it.
I don't think so. Mac OS X comes with every new Macintosh and there are no exceptions. I don't think Apple will ever sell an OS-less machine.
The thing is, Apple makes both the OS and the hardware, so I'm guessing the bulk of the cost of the machine is hardware cost... and the bundled software, as they say, is pure gravy.
Besides, I personally believe $499+ isn't too much to pay for a Macintosh. But that's just me... my overall experience with Mac hardware has been pretty good and I think it's worth paying that little extra...
In a way, Apple hardware is kind of like Debian. It's not bleeding edge, but it's stable and it works. (the good aesthetics is unimportant to me. I don't mind it though.)
Incidentally, just FYI, you can actually add 3rd-party RAM to the Mini yourself without voiding the warranty. Take a look at this:
Clearing up confusion about the Mac Mini
[quote]
While it is strongly recommended that you only have an Apple Authorized Service Provider crack it open and install RAM, hard drives, Airport and Bluetooth, it will NOT void your warranty if you do it yourself. As is standard operating procedure, however, anything you break while attempting anything on your own is not Apple's responsibility and will not be covered under warranty. I think that is pretty much common sense.
Among other things, the Mac mini boots headless too.
If your scheduling problem can be quantified (i.e. expressed as an LP), you can use this to solve for the optimal schedule given all sorts of constraints.
GAMS - General Algebraic Modeling System.
They use this for airline crew scheduling and all sorts of other stuff.
Also, look at this AMPL - A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming
I hope I haven't misunderstood your question though... (all you may need is iCal.... or maybe not.)
1) Actually as far as books are concerned he should buy them in India and bring them over (or have his relatives ship them over). Most countries outside of North America sell international edition textbooks which are WAY cheaper than any used book you can get here (it's something like $18 for a book that would cost $150 new/$80 used on Amazon). Also I am told that in India the prices are usually even lower than standard international edition issues because they print on lousier paper or something.
(btw it's actually legal (or more correctly, not illegal) to ship international editions into the U.S.... google for the U.S. court ruling)
2) PowerPoint.... no comment. Some of us use LaTeX's slide mode. But whatever works for you.
3) Useful, but what is probably more useful is having a good relationship with people in your research group (who have already taken the courses you're taking). I find that face-to-face contact is more efficient than online contact, though maybe having both is best.
4) Agreed. Pack your own lunch. Campus food is too expensive... it'll eat away at your already measly stipend.
GAs are not typically efficient on their own... and while their solutions are usually better than the nominal case (with no optimization), those solutions don't always qualify as "optimal".
quote:
When to Use GAs
GAs treat the optimization problem as a black box, and are therefore very flexible. Because GAs use very little problem structure they will inevitably perform poorly relative to an algorithm which is is designed for a specific problem type. GAs are therefore best suited to messy problems which do not admit more conventional optimization schemes. GAs can also be hybridized with other solution methods so that aspects of a problem which are amenable to a solution are solved using specialized techniques.
I agree that science is more policitized than many people think. But let me just add my two cents worth regarding pseudo-"black box" methods.
One of the reasons Neural Networks were viewed with some doubt was because of their "pseudo-black box" nature. Train it enough and you will get a model that gives you a good fit for your data, but you have no insight as to interpret the results, not least because you will almost never get the same model twice from the same data (the weights will be different every time you train them).
The neural networks idea sounded interesting because of the "cool" biological analogue it has with neurons firing in your brain (and it had interesting jargon to boot).
But if you look at its mathematical description it boils down to doing a simple regression/curve fitting with a limited nonlinear model that uses exponential functions (known in the NN community as "activation functions") like the sigmoid etc. (You can actually derive this if you write out the equations for a simple 1-2 layer neural network).
It spits out data that fits the curve, but tells you nothing about the correlations inside them. In the 1980s, people were attracted to it because of its simplicity and the fact that it seemed to be feasible way of mimicking a human's pattern matching abilities. It was all the rage back then. In the 1990s or so, people started to become aware of its weaknesses and began to look at it more circumspectly.
To give you an example, most credit card companies use Neural Networks to approve credit card applications. They pump your application data through a trained model (based on past classifications done by humans), and it spits out an "Approved" or "Not Approved" flag.
Unfortunately, you have no idea why a certain application is approved or not approved. A neural network model can't tell you that. It's only designed to give you an answer based on the its training weights, i.e. it only models the relationship between Y and X, and not the Y and X spaces themselves.
Instead, if you apply a multivariate statistical method such as PLS (via a NIPALS algorithm), the model will tell you how things are correlated (in a easy to interpret graphical fashion). It will pretty much be doing the same thing as the neural network, except that it models the X and Y spaces simultaneously, compensates for missing data by deriving from the correlation structures; all this by transforming the variables into a latent variable space that captures the maximum covariance in the data. All the equations are transparent and have a solid basis in the mathematics of linear transformations and projections.
And you get the same model each time, so it can tell you exactly why your credit card application was turned down. (Too many unpaid bills, for instance)
It is easy to become enamored of black-box methods (I know I was), but ultimately the methods that survive are the ones built on rigorous mathematical/scientific foundations. (not always possible, especially in areas like economics, but it is something to strive for)
Most ideas and theories get superseded over time, but black-box methods and theories produce the most controversies. Sometimes you can't blame the community for being a little skeptical of them.
Not everyone writes device drivers.
When you're talking about Java and C# being the languages in question, you're looking at application programming.
So many comments.... and nobody has realized that the article was talking about NATURAL PROGRAMMING and not NATURAL LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING (i.e. which to most of us conjures up notions of trying to make programming languages behave more English-like or employing belabored programming language structures that mirror common speech).
To my understanding, "Natural Programming" simply means a programming style that is suited to the way humans think ABOUT THEIR PROBLEM DOMAIN.
I like to use the example of dBASE and Paradox: the dBASE language (much like SQL) was an attempt at implementing a natural language programming syntax (it was the hot thing back then). It ended up being a language that was tedious and inefficient to write. (although it did have a cult following)
On the hand, the Paradox Application Language (before version 4.5 at least), was a succinct, concise and clear language -- it was a "natural language" for its problem domain (i.e. databases). One could slice and dice databases effortlessly with its built-in functions. The reason Paradox was called Paradox was just that: it was extremely capable of doing powerful and sophisticated stuff, and yet it was very easy to write and read.
Another example: When a human wants to iterate through a list, he thinks to himself "okay, let's run through this list from 1 to n".
In a language like C, he would have had to write this:
for (i = 1; i n; i++) {
dothis();
}
which involves assigning a number to a counter, checking a condition, and incrementing the counter. Kinda troublesome, right?
When in something like MATLAB, he could have just written:
for 1:n;
dothis()
end
which is far more natural.
If you are a VI fan and an elecrical engineer, you can always express it this way:
VI = Power
at least one person won't be able to open this lock: Superman.
Presumably he meant he was running Office 2k/XP on his Win32 laptop and has another copy on his own Apple (non-Microsoft?) machine (Office X maybe). Does the EULA cover that?
I would read mine except I don't have one.
This is interesting. 5 seconds? That's slow.
Are these proximity-type cards? Can RF-based proximity-card readers be used with terminals?
I use a proximity card to enter university buildings, and it takes less than 1 sec for the reader to read my card, find my record in the authorized personnel database, and unlock the door. Instantaneous.
UID/pw usually takes more than 1 sec -- it depends on the length of UID and pw, and how fast the person can type.
I don't want to turn this into a debate, but I believe in critically analyzing the text we're reading. When reading the bible (like any other text), it is often useful to consider the entire context.
If you don't, then it is often possible to contrive any naïve and convenient conclusion, and then claim that's what the good book teaches when it doesn't.
Re your syllogism, it is a fallacy of the most rudimentary kind:
Eve eats fruit from tree of life to gain wisdom
God punishes her
Therefore Eve was punished for gaining wisdom?
Is that the only conclusion? Must it be? What kind of wisdom does the original Hebrew word talk about? What about other possibilities supporting facts? It is unfair to make any conclusion without considering these questions.
In reality, what most Christians are taught is this (now you may consider this "interpretation"): *God punished Eve for disobedience to his explicit command*. That's it. There are also issues of pride and rebellion, and supposition that one might be equal to God, but I won't get into those. I've made my point. Case closed.
I ran the style command (wasn't bundled with Mac OS X, so I had to compile it) on a P.G. Wodehouse text. I got the below results. Utterly preposterous--P.G. Wodehouse's command of the English language is unparalleled...
readability grades:
Kincaid: 5.1
ARI: 5.4
Coleman-Liau: 8.7
Flesch Index: 84.0
Fog Index: 8.2
Lix: 30.0 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 8.1
sentence info:
289566 characters
69688 words, average length 4.16 characters = 1.28 syllables
4799 sentences, average length 14.5 words
51% (2458) short sentences (at most 10 words)
13% (663) long sentences (at least 25 words)
1 paragraphs, average length 4799.0 sentences
5% (240) questions
39% (1888) passive sentences
longest sent 180 wds at sent 39; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 28
word usage:
verb types:
to be (2408) auxiliary (905)
types as % of total:
conjunctions 4(3043) pronouns 14(9464) prepositions 12(8414)
nominalizations 1(675)
sentence beginnings:
pronoun (1825) interrogative pronoun (216) article (438)
subordinating conjunction (123) conjunction (235) preposition (218)
Well, it is actually true in Canada. The title Engineer is protected by law - it is illegal for anyone to misrepresent him/herself as an engineer without the proper qualifications. Most of people do it out of ignorance, but ignorance is no excuse.
Incidentally, graduate engineers (those who have completed a 4-year engineering degree) in Canada aren't allowed to use the title "engineer" either. They can only call themselves "junior engineer", up until they get professional certification from the provincial engineering body.
The term "engineer" is protected by provincial law. Sure, people can call themselves sanitation engineer or whatever they like, but they can't put that on their business card or job description title.
Hahaha that's a good one...
Perceived speed is actually quite important; from the perspective of a personal computer user, it is quite possibly more important than actual throughput. It influences a user's beliefs about his own productivity on the machine, which in turn affects actual productivity. I don't know about you, but on a machine where widgets just zip, I work faster... slow GUIs have the effect of insidiously slowing me down.
Somehow the responsiveness of the Panther UI leaves something to be desired. (I'm running OS X 10.3.4 on a 1GHz G4/768MB RAM)
It is a well known fact that the UI in Cocoa apps are a little sluggish, and in some cases more sluggish than in Windows apps. High-end G5 Mac users probably don't notice it, but it is actually quite obvious on midrange Macs. One gets used to it, of course, and very soon one ceases to be bothered by it--but one cannot help but feel it when one uses a Windows machine at work.
John Siracusa at ArsTechnica actually did an informal test (on scrolling and such, somewhere in this review) and recorded the results in a Quicktime movie file. He compared the speed of Cocoa controls to Win32 controls.
This is also evident if you compare Cocoa to X11. Even the UI in X11 apps running under OS X is more responsive than Cocoa, especially in scrolling. I'm not entirely sure why this is but some people attribute it to overheads in Cocoa.
In my own experience, I have come to the (unscientific) conclusion that for now, Windows apps do seem more responsive than Mac OS X apps on comparable machines (1GHz G4/768MB RAM vis-a-vis a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4/256MB RAM). That doesn't mean the Win32 apps are actually faster, mind you, just that their UIs feel that way. This would one area where Apple could make improvements on, and I think it will.
P.S. Having said all that, Mac OS X has many productivity enhancing features that compensate for its UI sluggishness: robust and fast multitasking, extensive keyboard control, aesthetically pleasant UI, automation capabailities, exceptionally well-designed tools, creatively crafted free apps (like Butler and Tofu) from the community etc. Yes, I cannot deny that I am actually more productive and creative in je ne sais quoi ways on my Mac than on Windows.... for the most part, it's just more pleasant to work on a Mac.
You're generally right about "perceived speed". This article explains how:
10 Things Apple did to make Mac OS X faster.
I use NetNewsWire Lite, and it's pretty good. I set Safari to open links in New tabs, so all I have to do in NNWlite is to press the right arrow button on an article, and press "+" to jump to the next unread article.
.NET app) and I believe it is one of the best FREE RSS readers on that platform. The only downside is that it is a little sluggish becauses it uses the IE component for HTML display and there is some overhead calling COM from .NET.
The only problem with NNWlite is that it does not recognize OPML groups. You have to recreate your groups if you're importing an OPML file.
If you want a more advanced FREE (well, donationware) newsreader, NewsMac is a good choice.
Here.
I've tried RSSOwl (Java) but I didn't like it. On XP, I used SharpReader (a free
IMHO, just going off an a tangent: I think many of us have been misled. Something else is quietly brewing.
.NET. Detractors may deride it as much as they want, but I believe this Microsoft's strategic weapon. Imagine a browser that can run a native lightweight UI (through Avalon). Imagine a world where such applications are trivial to build.
.NET, your knowledge in a .NET language like C# (and even your code!) can more or less be reused in ASP.NET, and in frameworks like .NET Compact.
.NET. .NET just works, for the most part. You can actually build usable GUI apps with it (unlike Java. The only decent GUI apps are SWT-based and even those feel klunky). And it will be interesting to see how things will look like in a few years.
.NET architecture -- which incidentally, was not conceived by Microsoft so much as it was by Anders Heijsberg who was pilfered from Borland. You can see the elegance of Borland engineering exude in .NET. Yes, I am a Borland fan.)
The stagnation of IE has been made to be seen as a bigger issue than it really is. We see Firefox making headway now and we are happy, but in reality, from a strategic point of view, it is no threat to IE in the long run unless it makes some fundamental changes.
If Microsoft gets its way, the fight is no longer going to be about rendering web pages.
I submit to you that this is due to
Right now, today, we are already beginning to see things like WYSIWYG HTML editors built with ASP.NET, that work like a native application embedded within the browser. (take a look at this, Devedit. Requires IE.
One might argue that we can sort of already do such things using XUL, Javascript, DHTML, Java etc. That's all nice and well, but how many technologies do you have to learn to build a simple app?
With
This was the dream everyone had for Java, and from the way things are going, it looks like this dream will come in to fruition in the form of
(btw, I am no MS supporter (my main machine is a Mac OS X box). But I have to admire the
Whoa, let's not be presumptuous here. It's easy for the man on the street to think that Apple should do this or that... but you have to consider the economics.
Apple does not traditionally target the ultra low-end market for a couple of reasons. For one, they're not big enough. I believe this came up in a discussion comparing Dell and Apple, and cheap PCs. Dell has the manufacturing facilities and [vastly superior] distribution channels to handle a high-volume low-margin market. Apple does not. Just look at the problems they're having churning out enough $249 iPod Minis for the U.S. market (btw, because of production problems, us chaps in Canada still can't buy iPod minis; they're only coming out Jul 24 over here).
Second, Apple has a reputation of making innovative products. It charges a premium for it. It just doesn't do assembly like Dell does; it also does industrial design. That's why iPods are well-liked and perceived to be cool. When it comes down to it, it's just a digital music player with really good design. Someone had to pay for the industrial design and marketing (not free, you know).
In short, Apple just doesn't seem like that kind of company that thrives on products that just barely breaking even. It can't survive in that market.
p.s. Steve Jobs has said that they're working to make cheaper iPods. But don't expect any $100 ones any time soon.
I think it's just a case of their phrasing being misleading.
I believe they mean that
1) Windows is not as insecure as YOU THINK
2) Mac OS X is not as secure as YOU THINK (they assume Mac OS X users think that the operating system has 0 to few exploits)
They're not really saying that Windows is more secure than Mac OS X. But the way the said it -- well, sure could mislead a lot of people.
Sure but it's not really ready to replace conventional crude yet.