SANDEEP KRISHNAMURTHY, Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce, University of Washington, Bothell
Oh.
So, what we have here is somebody just saying, in essense, "Gee, Microsoft, why isn't your software at human-level AI? I mean, how hard can that be?" and is so utterly incompetent at assessing how hard grammar checking is that they are utterly unaware of how incompetent they are. (Hmmm, that sounds familiar, though this isn't quite the same.)
I invite Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce Sandeep Krishnamurthy to try his hand at the AI problems he is upset that Microsoft hasn't waved a magic wand and fixed, though I feel obligated to warn him that as an associate professor of marketing, he's likely to be in for a world of intellectual hurt unless he's got some other source of knowledge and skill squirreled away somewhere, like a PhD in Computer Science he is for some reason forgetting to mention.... Perhaps then he would have some understanding of why even the mighty Microsoft has not yet produced the Perfect Grammar Checker....
On that note, check in with actual Linguists on the feasibility of the idea of a Perfect Grammar, too. You probably have a lot to learn there, too.
You did say this wasn't directly pointed at me. But I would point out that I did say, and therefore recognize, the question was rhetorical. I just think the argument is more powerful with the actual evidence that 30 seconds of work produced.
(I also thought of the fact that IMDB won't show his books, ghost-written or otherwise, but it took me a bit to find an author search. I don't think Amazon has one, but here's a Barnes and Noble author search for William Shatner, and I'm actually a little surprised. While there are quite a lot of repeats in the 96 results and I'm not about to filter them out, he's got a suprising number of actual books with his name on the cover, and some other interesting things out there.)
My primary point is that this is an easy question to answer, it need not be merely rhetorical. But nothing other than Star Trek jumps out at me. I didn't even know TekWar made it to a television series.
Sheesh, some accomplishment this is. I could probably create a wind-up toy to cross a golf stream like this! And I think we usually call those "banks", not "shelves".
You obviously don't understand what "orthogonal" means.
It mean that the "artistic" status of something is independent of its "legal" status. Something can be illegal and inartistic, legal and inartistic, illegal and artistic, and legal and artistic, and the two are not related.
We wrap this up in the term "orthogonal" because it's a simple concept that shouldn't need to be belabored each time, and it gets even more complicated to fully expand as the number of orthogonal dimensions expands.
You just said (though I doubt you mean) that they are related, which is to say, that to some extent illegality is a pre-requisite to artisticness, or vice versa, which are both absurd; all combinations happen freely.
You should consider strengthing that weak brain of yours.
You might want to read more carefully. If everything is art, so is graffiti, sure... but so what? So is murder, getting high, and sitting still and doing nothing. (Do it for four minutes and thirty three seconds and it's even a copyright violation under the right circumstances.) If everything is art, "art" has no value whatsoever, it's just a meaningless, but emotionally-laden, word, to be waved like a flag... which is what you're doing, but without comprehension.
You don't really want to turn to the "everything is art" crowd for vindication on this one. They are also the reason "art" is dead, at least to most of us. You're going to want to go to older, more conventional definitions where I think you're on firmer ground.
My opinion? Graffiti carries the connotation of illegality and art, and those two things are orthogonal. "Graffiti is art" is a non-sequitor to an accusation that a given piece of graffiti is illegal property destruction. So personally, I find it a rather silly discussion overall anyhow, an attempt to fuzzy up the conversation by dealing with connotations and hiding behind the denotations when challenged. I don't play that game, or at least I do as little as possible.
I have no particular regrets about my University experience. I'm the guy who picked his major right off, and stuck with it through a Masters because I knew what I wanted, going in.
I say "the guy" because so far, I have yet to meet anyone else in real life who took this path. (I'm sure there are many on Slashdot, but that's a much larger pool, so obviously there will be some. My point is the relative size.)
My wife regrets not learning there was a vet tech program in college, instead getting a Zoology degree. And again, note the phrase "not learning"; she never explored enough to find out, and certainly nobody told her.
If you don't know what you want to do, don't declare a major in the first year. Ignore the U requirements for a bit, and just start taking every 101 class you think sounds interesting. Personally, along with my Canonical Computer Nerd path, I also could have majored in music (abysmal earnings potential, I don't think I have "it"), psychology (fascinating), hell, even sociology (useless discipline for supporting me, though). And that's not even a complete list.
It's especially helpful to do this if you're intellectually diverse, because I don't believe in the "one true job" idea. If you find many interesting things, you can pick the one most likely to support you.
That said, while a year off can focus you (or the complete opposite, only you know), and you might find that thing you want to do, it's a relatively limited selection compared to what a University would offer. How are you going to find out if you like Psychology? Or math? (What you've studied up until now isn't math, it's just number twiddling and formula memorization, unless you've done a ton of proofs.) Or chemical engineering? I'm not aware of a way to discover that out of University. (Sure, you might pick up a chance at one of them, but you're not going to get a chance to choose from the entire selection.)
I have no answers, just more questions, but that's a good start, too.
AC says: What the fuck? They're sending the dude to Japan. He should go and have a damn good time. A damn hell ass good time. If it doesn't work out, THEN he can quit.
I had to think about this for a bit, but I think there's only one thing to do:
Quit.
Honestly, if I was in your situation, and I could not talk anyone out of it, I'd either quit or demand a gigantic pay raise unless they were already paying me really well.
Were this in Java or Python or a web app, something where you stand a chance with international charsets, it might be OK.
English to German or some other Latinate language might be OK.
If this was in something that didn't depend on drawing static forms on the screen, but instead built the forms from metadata, you might stand a chance. (This is assuming your VB app took the path of least resistance and doesn't already run this way, so you'll be completely re-drawing every form.)
An app that had already been localized into something else might be OK, or one that had been planned for it since the beginning.
But this? Absurdly large task for one person. You could be doing this for years, and it's just not fun enough for that.
I sure hope the code is of a decent quality. If it's spaghetti code to boot, this message goes from 25% toungue-in-cheek to full out serious advice, because the L10N is going to touch everything. You're going to be stunned what new code paths are going to be generated.
If 10 billion light years worth of protons travelling from a galaxy had a mass, does it's own emitted energy pull it away from the bang? and do other stars' emitted energy push away at the accellerating galaxies?
You're suffering from what I call the Big Number Fallacy; while the number of photons may be large, the amount of matter is so much larger it completely swamps it.
More to the point, conservation of energy and mass<->energy equivalency says that when a star emits a photon, it loses that energy in mass. Obviously, stars are not routinely boiling away due to photon energy losses, or indeed, energy losses at all. Not enough mass-energy is floating around as photons to affect anything.
What was that experiment confirming Earth's 'tearing' effect of gravity the sattelite?
I think you're referring to the "frame dragging" experiment, which is almost completely unrelated, except inasmuch as they are both related to relativity.
I know it's fun to play word games with the shiny Physics and Cosmology terms, but if you really care, you need to learn the real stuff, not merely keywords. I rather liked this; the fact that it's seriously tough shit is a good sign, if you get my drift. If it's easy, you're just playing word games.
But what if the constants aren't and the "laws" are convoluted, contingent, or stochastic?
Studied QM much?
Less snarkily, the neat thing about physics-in-the-small is even the convoluted (brutally counter-intuitive) and stochastic laws we've developed are still fairly simple and elegant, and even though we aren't done there is no particular reason to believe the final iteration won't have elegance, either. The complexity comes from the sheer quantity of things; how many quarks are in your body, again?
(The elegance probably won't be comprehensible to the Man on the Street, though; physics is about 300 years ahead of him.)
Except possibly for #4, which of those things are new?
(And substitute the generic "misspelling" for #4 and even that holds.)
The form of the errors is changing. You're noticing that. But are you sure the quantity is?
(Honest question, though my guess is you can't really tell, it'll just be your "feel", and in this case, no offense intended, that's somewhat suspect by the nature of self-reporting.)
Compression algorithms map one huge number (consider an entire file as one huge number) to another. They "work" because most huge numbers of interest in a given domain aren't valid; random ASCII is gibberish, not English, so we remap that "random" looking stuff to stuff of more interest. This allows us to pack the interesting things much more tightly into the small numbers.
But for every number we shorten, we must also lengthen a number. Real-world algorithms do clever things to minimize the real-world impact of this fact, so you don't see it, but it's obvious if you think about it. If you have a sequence "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10" which maps back to 1-10, for every number you pull down (move 8 -> 2), another number moves up.
No matter what you do, you can't create a magical compression algorithm that can be the "DNA" of all other numbers. You didn't say this directly, but a lot of people have this idea floating around in their head and I sort of "smell" it in your post.
(Proof: Suppose you have a compression algorithm that always shortens a number, and the corresponding decryption function. (Note we don't assume anything about the nature of the algorithm other than the compression, so it applies to all such algorithms, no matter how fancy the math.) Of the binary numbers 00, 01, 10, 11, each is therefore shortened to 1 bit. But there are only two possibilities for that one bit, and it has to cover 4 numbers. This is not possible for a decompression function by definition of "function". Therefore, contradiction, and there is no such compression algorithm.
I left the terminology a little fuzzy to try to prevent Math Overload; mathematicians should be able to fill in the blanks fairly easily.)
Keep going, and don't let the nattering neybobs of negativism here at/. get you down.
You know, I understand what you're getting at here, but you need to understand where the "nattering naybobs" are coming from. We're not saying "We've never seen this before and we're sure it won't work, don't try, fingers stuck in my ear, blah blah blah!" We're saying "We've seen several implementations of this idea, they all suck in the same fundamental way, and we've never seen anybody with a functional solution to the suckage problem."
You want to try your hand at it, be my guest. If you have taken the time to understand history, what has failed in the past, the problems encountered by others, and you still want to try, well, go for it. It's your time.
But if you think, and I get this vibe from the original poster, "Hey, there's nobody who's tried this great idea, I think I'll start a project on it!"... you're fucked, plain and simple, and throwing a bit of water on that ethusiasm is a favor, right up there with "Your first programming project should not be a real-time strategy RPG." Encouragement is great and all, but you should not encourage someone who's just been mountaineering for a week to take on Everest. Discouragement can be a positive thing.
At the very least, educate yourself before starting. There's a lot of failure in this field.
Two of my "general principles" come into play here:
"When a lot of other very smart people have tried to solve the problem, but you think you have the answer, you almost certainly don't, and you certainly don't if it seems 'simple' or 'obvious' to you." This fits that in spades; a lot of very smart people have tried this and failed.
"There exists a lot of solutions that only work in demos, or worse yet, when you just 'imagine' it in your head, but crash and burn when faced with the real world. Anything works in a demo, or in your head, even the absolutely impossible. If you've never seen it outside of a demo, there's a reason." And that fits this whole "graphical programming" to a T; it's trivial to create an "ooo, ahh" demo with the execution flying around the screen, two or three 'if's and a "for". But there aren't very many functions, let alone programs, that work with two 'if's and a for loop. (Another thing that fits here is many interesting AI solutions in academia that are claimed to be generally powerful, with varying justification, but in five years of working with the solution they've only managed one very particular demo.)
Go for the gusto, but if you just close your eyes and hum when people try to explain why it's a hard problem, you're dooming yourself from the getgo and wasting your time.
I rather strongly suspect that the NYTimes article had all of the religious comments that were recieved, not merely a sampling, or very close.
The Galapagos Islands one may offend someone, but Cosmic Voyage, unless they are not telling us something, would be objected to only by a total lunatic fringe... which is no problem because every film will be objectionable to some total lunatic fringe, no exaggeration.
I am not aware of any significant religious group in operation in the United States with any sort of organized, sigificant political clout that has a serious problem with or denies the existance of atoms or galaxies.
If the Imax documentary industry wishes to commit suicide for a dubious political point, they are welcome to. But all y'all Slashdotters would be wise to not suck it up like little lapdogs getting your world views confirmed; for those of you who would consider your world views confirmed by this story, class it in the "too good to be true" category.
The primary adjective to apply to anyone ignorant enough to protest atoms or galaxies is just ignorant, not "religious", and I assure you, a lot of very ignorant people agree with any position you care to name.
(By the way, you can't imagine the pride I felt when I "cought" the freak icon next to your handle. Are you sure you'll have to "play"? Sorry, I couldn't resist. ("Your relationships are public information, and visible to other Slashdot readers."))
Which reminds me. Watch ten episodes of the show Clean Sweep. While not a masterpiece of reality television, I do have to say it is one of the shows that has personally impacted me and my priorities the most. In that sense it's probably one of the best shows ever on television, even though it suprises me to type that, as few shows ever manage that.
It helps, a lot; even if you don't do everything, which you probably shouldn't unless your house looks like one you see on the show, it will still give you a lot of good ideas and a new way to look at your crap.
The one that speaks the most to me, especially as a engineer type, is discounting the value of your stuff against the odds of using it in the future, and not neglecting how a lot of little things add up to a big thing. If you have a huge "box of stuff" that you might use in the future like misc. electronics or screws or whatever, but, realistically, you can only expect to use three or four things out of it in the next twenty years, unless these things are immensely valuable, you should either sell or toss the entire collection, because the cost of storage (both in real costs, moving costs, and opportunity costs due to the lost space) swamp the value of the gee-gaws. (Even better is if you can sort through the junk and pluck out, with reasonable confidence, the six or seven things you have a high probability of using and toss the rest; I've collapsed a big pile down to about three parts that way, and so far, I've missed nothing I threw out and used two of the three parts. Your ability to reasonably guess is probably better than you think.)
It's a very powerful economic argument.
While perhaps not directly on topic, it's certainly related; for instance, while I tend to keep all my music CDs (as I use a lot of my collection very often since it's all mp3/ogg now, and I'm legally obligated to keep the CDs), I will fairly often sort through the movies semi-aggressively, and barring the recent expansion caused by purchasing TV series, we have kept a fairly constant amount of space dedicated to movies over the years, even accounting for the fact that we are more careful only to buy things that we expect to want to see enough times to make it worth it. Your milage with music CDs may vary; my purchasing habits with them are fairly conservative so I know I'll like what I'm spending $15 on. (Were they cheaper I might have more to throw out.)
No, I have read "The Science Of Star Trek". If actually read, it says, repeatedly, "This thing they show on Star Trek is not actually possible, but a lesser version of it may be", excepting our modern communication system which in most ways exceeds anything we've seen on Trek (except for voice-only call routing which we'll have long before the 24th century if we care). To me, that is not a confirmation of Star Trek, it is a confirmation that they have no particular basis in reality. (Which isn't a crime, except that they or their fans claim to.)
Merely spouting the name of the book, without having really read it, is a poor defense.
Simplify, simplify, simplify
on
CD Storage Advice?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Other people have good ideas.
But I'd suggest step one is to simplify your life; if you're at all like me, you don't need all those CDs. I don't even mean in the "if you're not careful, your possessions possess you" sense (although if you want to go that route, that can help too), I mean in the "drivers for the motherboard two motherboards ago that went up in smoke" or "drivers for my nVidia Riva 128 that even if I installed in a system again I'd just download" or "free trial version crap included in a box of Cheerios".
I was beginning to have this problem too, but lo, I cleaned out my CDs, wasn't even too aggressive about it, and lo, well over half of the CD-ROMs were garbage and suddenly I didn't have a problem anymore.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to music CDs, but this can help with the CD-ROM problem.
(If you've already done this, then consider this advice for others.)
How Star-Trek creates some fiction about a type of technology/species, then a few years later it's a scientific-discovery/engineering-acheivement.
Yes.
It's almost as if the scientific research precedes Star Trek... or as if a million-bajillion other science fiction stories had similar ideas that Star Trek could copy...
Don't give Star Trek too much credit. About all they've ever invented is terminology, much of which is surprisingly crappy if you actually learn about the fields they are raping for ideas. (Metals given ceramic names, elements given chemical names and vice versa, "compounds", "alloys", and other such terms mixed freely with no regard for what they mean; if such things were isolated occurances one could argue about term drift, but the fact is you have to search for terminology used correctly in later Trek.) It's been a long time since Star Trek was on the cutting edge of anything.
Don't learn your science from Star Trek, either. It leaves you an ignorant, easily-mislead scientific fool. I wouldn't say this except that it is clear too many people have. It's been a long time since Star Trek was a positive force for the sciences, too.
You know, it's not Slashdot's fault you can't read. Whack "reply", and you'll see:
Allowed HTML <B> <I> <P> <A> <LI> <OL> <UL> <EM> <BR> <TT> <STRONG> <BLOCKQUOTE> <DIV> <ECODE> <DL> <DT> <DD> <CITE> (Use "ECODE" instead of "PRE" or "CODE".)
And note that I used ECODE to show that.
Ecode isn't perfect,
but
it
does
preserve
indentation without histrionics.
And it preserves brackets:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> < html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
It eats extra spaces in the text itself, though; in that example "indentation without" has four spaces between those two words. (They're probably still in the HTML, just not converted.) But the HTML was just a straight copy-paste.
All you have to do is ban the referrer page through robots.txt.
(rel="nofollow" only works for one search engine and is not the best solution when you can block the whole page. rel="nofollow" is for when you can't block the whole page but want to block specific links.)
XMLHttpRequest "just" lets you access a web page. It doesn't let you interact with a database.
If you want to interact with a database, you have to add a web page that does that. I strongly suggest adding a back-end to your website that just dumps out the data you want as a Javascript object, and use "eval" to read it in, as that is by far the fastest and most flexible approach. (XML is great and all but in my experience on Mozilla the XML parser can nail you for entire seconds worth of time, which is unacceptable.)
There isn't much to say about XMLHttpRequest; its capabilities are a straight reflection of the capabilities of a website, on its own it can do nothing more than retrieve static data. Oh, and use async for everything but debugging, or Mozilla will kill your performance.
I did mean that starting from scratch probably isn't doable. I didn't bother looking for something that already existed since, well, frankly I didn't care. Advice gathered from Slashdot is worth every penny.
It still doesn't look to me like Nagios solves everything off-the-shelf that I've encountered in my life, but that sure does go a long way towards it.
So I'll revise my statement to say you're insane not to use something like Nagios, and write whatever plugins you need if they don't exist already, which they probably won't for custom in-house apps.
Of the top of my head, while I doubt it can be applied in its entirity to all of "system administration" in any realistic way, two things are possible, I think.
First, and most obviously, you can apply agile methodologies to creating sysadmin tools to help you do your job.
Second, more subtlely, and perhaps more importantly, you can apply the idea of pervasive testing, probably the most important tenant of agile methodologies (although that's my opinion, not necessarily held by the "experts"), to your sysadmin job.
Every time a user calls you up and says a resource is down, and you didn't already know about it, that is a failure. Really, creating test scripts for such things isn't too hard on average; a script to send email through the corporate email system and retrieve it, once a minute. A script to iterate through all user files and do some basic permission checks every night. A script that pings critical machines every five seconds and does something drastic if they don't reply.
A lot of this is available haphazardly already, some of it you'd have to write, and some things you'd have to get a little creative with. (Example: Checking if the voice mail system is still up is not impossible, but would take a bit of work.) What I'd recommend to go forward in an "agile" sense is to start plucking low lying fruit: Whatever you current most common problem is that you get from users, write a script to detect it before they do. Then proceed to the next most common problem.
A completely adaptive system that detects everything is probably out of your reach. On the other hand, the number of relatively simple precautions that could be taken and aren't sometimes surprises me. You can reach a happy middle in most cases, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what we have here is somebody just saying, in essense, "Gee, Microsoft, why isn't your software at human-level AI? I mean, how hard can that be?" and is so utterly incompetent at assessing how hard grammar checking is that they are utterly unaware of how incompetent they are. (Hmmm, that sounds familiar, though this isn't quite the same.)
I invite Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce Sandeep Krishnamurthy to try his hand at the AI problems he is upset that Microsoft hasn't waved a magic wand and fixed, though I feel obligated to warn him that as an associate professor of marketing, he's likely to be in for a world of intellectual hurt unless he's got some other source of knowledge and skill squirreled away somewhere, like a PhD in Computer Science he is for some reason forgetting to mention.... Perhaps then he would have some understanding of why even the mighty Microsoft has not yet produced the Perfect Grammar Checker....
On that note, check in with actual Linguists on the feasibility of the idea of a Perfect Grammar, too. You probably have a lot to learn there, too.
You did say this wasn't directly pointed at me. But I would point out that I did say, and therefore recognize, the question was rhetorical. I just think the argument is more powerful with the actual evidence that 30 seconds of work produced.
(I also thought of the fact that IMDB won't show his books, ghost-written or otherwise, but it took me a bit to find an author search. I don't think Amazon has one, but here's a Barnes and Noble author search for William Shatner, and I'm actually a little surprised. While there are quite a lot of repeats in the 96 results and I'm not about to filter them out, he's got a suprising number of actual books with his name on the cover, and some other interesting things out there.)
What has [Shatner] done SINCE then?
Stuff.
My primary point is that this is an easy question to answer, it need not be merely rhetorical. But nothing other than Star Trek jumps out at me. I didn't even know TekWar made it to a television series.
Sheesh, some accomplishment this is. I could probably create a wind-up toy to cross a golf stream like this! And I think we usually call those "banks", not "shelves".
You obviously don't understand what "orthogonal" means.
It mean that the "artistic" status of something is independent of its "legal" status. Something can be illegal and inartistic, legal and inartistic, illegal and artistic, and legal and artistic, and the two are not related.
We wrap this up in the term "orthogonal" because it's a simple concept that shouldn't need to be belabored each time, and it gets even more complicated to fully expand as the number of orthogonal dimensions expands.
You just said (though I doubt you mean) that they are related, which is to say, that to some extent illegality is a pre-requisite to artisticness, or vice versa, which are both absurd; all combinations happen freely.
You should consider strengthing that weak brain of yours.
You might want to read more carefully. If everything is art, so is graffiti, sure... but so what? So is murder, getting high, and sitting still and doing nothing. (Do it for four minutes and thirty three seconds and it's even a copyright violation under the right circumstances.) If everything is art, "art" has no value whatsoever, it's just a meaningless, but emotionally-laden, word, to be waved like a flag... which is what you're doing, but without comprehension.
You don't really want to turn to the "everything is art" crowd for vindication on this one. They are also the reason "art" is dead, at least to most of us. You're going to want to go to older, more conventional definitions where I think you're on firmer ground.
My opinion? Graffiti carries the connotation of illegality and art, and those two things are orthogonal. "Graffiti is art" is a non-sequitor to an accusation that a given piece of graffiti is illegal property destruction. So personally, I find it a rather silly discussion overall anyhow, an attempt to fuzzy up the conversation by dealing with connotations and hiding behind the denotations when challenged. I don't play that game, or at least I do as little as possible.
I have no particular regrets about my University experience. I'm the guy who picked his major right off, and stuck with it through a Masters because I knew what I wanted, going in.
I say "the guy" because so far, I have yet to meet anyone else in real life who took this path. (I'm sure there are many on Slashdot, but that's a much larger pool, so obviously there will be some. My point is the relative size.)
My wife regrets not learning there was a vet tech program in college, instead getting a Zoology degree. And again, note the phrase "not learning"; she never explored enough to find out, and certainly nobody told her.
If you don't know what you want to do, don't declare a major in the first year. Ignore the U requirements for a bit, and just start taking every 101 class you think sounds interesting. Personally, along with my Canonical Computer Nerd path, I also could have majored in music (abysmal earnings potential, I don't think I have "it"), psychology (fascinating), hell, even sociology (useless discipline for supporting me, though). And that's not even a complete list.
It's especially helpful to do this if you're intellectually diverse, because I don't believe in the "one true job" idea. If you find many interesting things, you can pick the one most likely to support you.
That said, while a year off can focus you (or the complete opposite, only you know), and you might find that thing you want to do, it's a relatively limited selection compared to what a University would offer. How are you going to find out if you like Psychology? Or math? (What you've studied up until now isn't math, it's just number twiddling and formula memorization, unless you've done a ton of proofs.) Or chemical engineering? I'm not aware of a way to discover that out of University. (Sure, you might pick up a chance at one of them, but you're not going to get a chance to choose from the entire selection.)
I have no answers, just more questions, but that's a good start, too.
AC says: What the fuck? They're sending the dude to Japan. He should go and have a damn good time. A damn hell ass good time. If it doesn't work out, THEN he can quit.
:-)
Touche'.
But you get my point.
I had to think about this for a bit, but I think there's only one thing to do:
Quit.
Honestly, if I was in your situation, and I could not talk anyone out of it, I'd either quit or demand a gigantic pay raise unless they were already paying me really well.
Were this in Java or Python or a web app, something where you stand a chance with international charsets, it might be OK.
English to German or some other Latinate language might be OK.
If this was in something that didn't depend on drawing static forms on the screen, but instead built the forms from metadata, you might stand a chance. (This is assuming your VB app took the path of least resistance and doesn't already run this way, so you'll be completely re-drawing every form.)
An app that had already been localized into something else might be OK, or one that had been planned for it since the beginning.
But this? Absurdly large task for one person. You could be doing this for years, and it's just not fun enough for that.
I sure hope the code is of a decent quality. If it's spaghetti code to boot, this message goes from 25% toungue-in-cheek to full out serious advice, because the L10N is going to touch everything. You're going to be stunned what new code paths are going to be generated.
If 10 billion light years worth of protons travelling from a galaxy had a mass, does it's own emitted energy pull it away from the bang? and do other stars' emitted energy push away at the accellerating galaxies?
You're suffering from what I call the Big Number Fallacy; while the number of photons may be large, the amount of matter is so much larger it completely swamps it.
More to the point, conservation of energy and mass<->energy equivalency says that when a star emits a photon, it loses that energy in mass. Obviously, stars are not routinely boiling away due to photon energy losses, or indeed, energy losses at all. Not enough mass-energy is floating around as photons to affect anything.
What was that experiment confirming Earth's 'tearing' effect of gravity the sattelite?
I think you're referring to the "frame dragging" experiment, which is almost completely unrelated, except inasmuch as they are both related to relativity.
I know it's fun to play word games with the shiny Physics and Cosmology terms, but if you really care, you need to learn the real stuff, not merely keywords. I rather liked this; the fact that it's seriously tough shit is a good sign, if you get my drift. If it's easy, you're just playing word games.
But what if the constants aren't and the "laws" are convoluted, contingent, or stochastic?
Studied QM much?
Less snarkily, the neat thing about physics-in-the-small is even the convoluted (brutally counter-intuitive) and stochastic laws we've developed are still fairly simple and elegant, and even though we aren't done there is no particular reason to believe the final iteration won't have elegance, either. The complexity comes from the sheer quantity of things; how many quarks are in your body, again?
(The elegance probably won't be comprehensible to the Man on the Street, though; physics is about 300 years ahead of him.)
Except possibly for #4, which of those things are new?
(And substitute the generic "misspelling" for #4 and even that holds.)
The form of the errors is changing. You're noticing that. But are you sure the quantity is?
(Honest question, though my guess is you can't really tell, it'll just be your "feel", and in this case, no offense intended, that's somewhat suspect by the nature of self-reporting.)
No.
Compression algorithms map one huge number (consider an entire file as one huge number) to another. They "work" because most huge numbers of interest in a given domain aren't valid; random ASCII is gibberish, not English, so we remap that "random" looking stuff to stuff of more interest. This allows us to pack the interesting things much more tightly into the small numbers.
But for every number we shorten, we must also lengthen a number. Real-world algorithms do clever things to minimize the real-world impact of this fact, so you don't see it, but it's obvious if you think about it. If you have a sequence "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10" which maps back to 1-10, for every number you pull down (move 8 -> 2), another number moves up.
No matter what you do, you can't create a magical compression algorithm that can be the "DNA" of all other numbers. You didn't say this directly, but a lot of people have this idea floating around in their head and I sort of "smell" it in your post.
(Proof: Suppose you have a compression algorithm that always shortens a number, and the corresponding decryption function. (Note we don't assume anything about the nature of the algorithm other than the compression, so it applies to all such algorithms, no matter how fancy the math.) Of the binary numbers 00, 01, 10, 11, each is therefore shortened to 1 bit. But there are only two possibilities for that one bit, and it has to cover 4 numbers. This is not possible for a decompression function by definition of "function". Therefore, contradiction, and there is no such compression algorithm.
I left the terminology a little fuzzy to try to prevent Math Overload; mathematicians should be able to fill in the blanks fairly easily.)
You know, I understand what you're getting at here, but you need to understand where the "nattering naybobs" are coming from. We're not saying "We've never seen this before and we're sure it won't work, don't try, fingers stuck in my ear, blah blah blah!" We're saying "We've seen several implementations of this idea, they all suck in the same fundamental way, and we've never seen anybody with a functional solution to the suckage problem."
You want to try your hand at it, be my guest. If you have taken the time to understand history, what has failed in the past, the problems encountered by others, and you still want to try, well, go for it. It's your time.
But if you think, and I get this vibe from the original poster, "Hey, there's nobody who's tried this great idea, I think I'll start a project on it!"... you're fucked, plain and simple, and throwing a bit of water on that ethusiasm is a favor, right up there with "Your first programming project should not be a real-time strategy RPG." Encouragement is great and all, but you should not encourage someone who's just been mountaineering for a week to take on Everest. Discouragement can be a positive thing.
At the very least, educate yourself before starting. There's a lot of failure in this field.
Two of my "general principles" come into play here:
- "When a lot of other very smart people have tried to solve the problem, but you think you have the answer, you almost certainly don't, and you certainly don't if it seems 'simple' or 'obvious' to you." This fits that in spades; a lot of very smart people have tried this and failed.
- "There exists a lot of solutions that only work in demos, or worse yet, when you just 'imagine' it in your head, but crash and burn when faced with the real world. Anything works in a demo, or in your head, even the absolutely impossible. If you've never seen it outside of a demo, there's a reason." And that fits this whole "graphical programming" to a T; it's trivial to create an "ooo, ahh" demo with the execution flying around the screen, two or three 'if's and a "for". But there aren't very many functions, let alone programs, that work with two 'if's and a for loop. (Another thing that fits here is many interesting AI solutions in academia that are claimed to be generally powerful, with varying justification, but in five years of working with the solution they've only managed one very particular demo.)
Go for the gusto, but if you just close your eyes and hum when people try to explain why it's a hard problem, you're dooming yourself from the getgo and wasting your time.I rather strongly suspect that the NYTimes article had all of the religious comments that were recieved, not merely a sampling, or very close.
The Galapagos Islands one may offend someone, but Cosmic Voyage, unless they are not telling us something, would be objected to only by a total lunatic fringe... which is no problem because every film will be objectionable to some total lunatic fringe, no exaggeration.
I am not aware of any significant religious group in operation in the United States with any sort of organized, sigificant political clout that has a serious problem with or denies the existance of atoms or galaxies.
If the Imax documentary industry wishes to commit suicide for a dubious political point, they are welcome to. But all y'all Slashdotters would be wise to not suck it up like little lapdogs getting your world views confirmed; for those of you who would consider your world views confirmed by this story, class it in the "too good to be true" category.
The primary adjective to apply to anyone ignorant enough to protest atoms or galaxies is just ignorant, not "religious", and I assure you, a lot of very ignorant people agree with any position you care to name.
If i get cought ill play dumb.
:-)
Well, you could. Not anymore.
(By the way, you can't imagine the pride I felt when I "cought" the freak icon next to your handle. Are you sure you'll have to "play"? Sorry, I couldn't resist. ("Your relationships are public information, and visible to other Slashdot readers."))
I say this as a reformed packrat.
Which reminds me. Watch ten episodes of the show Clean Sweep. While not a masterpiece of reality television, I do have to say it is one of the shows that has personally impacted me and my priorities the most. In that sense it's probably one of the best shows ever on television, even though it suprises me to type that, as few shows ever manage that.
It helps, a lot; even if you don't do everything, which you probably shouldn't unless your house looks like one you see on the show, it will still give you a lot of good ideas and a new way to look at your crap.
The one that speaks the most to me, especially as a engineer type, is discounting the value of your stuff against the odds of using it in the future, and not neglecting how a lot of little things add up to a big thing. If you have a huge "box of stuff" that you might use in the future like misc. electronics or screws or whatever, but, realistically, you can only expect to use three or four things out of it in the next twenty years, unless these things are immensely valuable, you should either sell or toss the entire collection, because the cost of storage (both in real costs, moving costs, and opportunity costs due to the lost space) swamp the value of the gee-gaws. (Even better is if you can sort through the junk and pluck out, with reasonable confidence, the six or seven things you have a high probability of using and toss the rest; I've collapsed a big pile down to about three parts that way, and so far, I've missed nothing I threw out and used two of the three parts. Your ability to reasonably guess is probably better than you think.)
It's a very powerful economic argument.
While perhaps not directly on topic, it's certainly related; for instance, while I tend to keep all my music CDs (as I use a lot of my collection very often since it's all mp3/ogg now, and I'm legally obligated to keep the CDs), I will fairly often sort through the movies semi-aggressively, and barring the recent expansion caused by purchasing TV series, we have kept a fairly constant amount of space dedicated to movies over the years, even accounting for the fact that we are more careful only to buy things that we expect to want to see enough times to make it worth it. Your milage with music CDs may vary; my purchasing habits with them are fairly conservative so I know I'll like what I'm spending $15 on. (Were they cheaper I might have more to throw out.)
No, I have read "The Science Of Star Trek". If actually read, it says, repeatedly, "This thing they show on Star Trek is not actually possible, but a lesser version of it may be", excepting our modern communication system which in most ways exceeds anything we've seen on Trek (except for voice-only call routing which we'll have long before the 24th century if we care). To me, that is not a confirmation of Star Trek, it is a confirmation that they have no particular basis in reality. (Which isn't a crime, except that they or their fans claim to.)
Merely spouting the name of the book, without having really read it, is a poor defense.
Other people have good ideas.
But I'd suggest step one is to simplify your life; if you're at all like me, you don't need all those CDs. I don't even mean in the "if you're not careful, your possessions possess you" sense (although if you want to go that route, that can help too), I mean in the "drivers for the motherboard two motherboards ago that went up in smoke" or "drivers for my nVidia Riva 128 that even if I installed in a system again I'd just download" or "free trial version crap included in a box of Cheerios".
I was beginning to have this problem too, but lo, I cleaned out my CDs, wasn't even too aggressive about it, and lo, well over half of the CD-ROMs were garbage and suddenly I didn't have a problem anymore.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to music CDs, but this can help with the CD-ROM problem.
(If you've already done this, then consider this advice for others.)
How Star-Trek creates some fiction about a type of technology/species, then a few years later it's a scientific-discovery/engineering-acheivement.
Yes.
It's almost as if the scientific research precedes Star Trek... or as if a million-bajillion other science fiction stories had similar ideas that Star Trek could copy...
Don't give Star Trek too much credit. About all they've ever invented is terminology, much of which is surprisingly crappy if you actually learn about the fields they are raping for ideas. (Metals given ceramic names, elements given chemical names and vice versa, "compounds", "alloys", and other such terms mixed freely with no regard for what they mean; if such things were isolated occurances one could argue about term drift, but the fact is you have to search for terminology used correctly in later Trek.) It's been a long time since Star Trek was on the cutting edge of anything.
Don't learn your science from Star Trek, either. It leaves you an ignorant, easily-mislead scientific fool. I wouldn't say this except that it is clear too many people have. It's been a long time since Star Trek was a positive force for the sciences, too.
Ecode isn't perfect,It eats extra spaces in the text itself, though; in that example "indentation without" has four spaces between those two words. (They're probably still in the HTML, just not converted.) But the HTML was just a straight copy-paste.
All you have to do is ban the referrer page through robots.txt.
(rel="nofollow" only works for one search engine and is not the best solution when you can block the whole page. rel="nofollow" is for when you can't block the whole page but want to block specific links.)
XMLHttpRequest "just" lets you access a web page. It doesn't let you interact with a database.
If you want to interact with a database, you have to add a web page that does that. I strongly suggest adding a back-end to your website that just dumps out the data you want as a Javascript object, and use "eval" to read it in, as that is by far the fastest and most flexible approach. (XML is great and all but in my experience on Mozilla the XML parser can nail you for entire seconds worth of time, which is unacceptable.)
There isn't much to say about XMLHttpRequest; its capabilities are a straight reflection of the capabilities of a website, on its own it can do nothing more than retrieve static data. Oh, and use async for everything but debugging, or Mozilla will kill your performance.
No, not really. Did you read my disclaimers?
I did mean that starting from scratch probably isn't doable. I didn't bother looking for something that already existed since, well, frankly I didn't care. Advice gathered from Slashdot is worth every penny.
It still doesn't look to me like Nagios solves everything off-the-shelf that I've encountered in my life, but that sure does go a long way towards it.
So I'll revise my statement to say you're insane not to use something like Nagios, and write whatever plugins you need if they don't exist already, which they probably won't for custom in-house apps.
Of the top of my head, while I doubt it can be applied in its entirity to all of "system administration" in any realistic way, two things are possible, I think.
First, and most obviously, you can apply agile methodologies to creating sysadmin tools to help you do your job.
Second, more subtlely, and perhaps more importantly, you can apply the idea of pervasive testing, probably the most important tenant of agile methodologies (although that's my opinion, not necessarily held by the "experts"), to your sysadmin job.
Every time a user calls you up and says a resource is down, and you didn't already know about it, that is a failure. Really, creating test scripts for such things isn't too hard on average; a script to send email through the corporate email system and retrieve it, once a minute. A script to iterate through all user files and do some basic permission checks every night. A script that pings critical machines every five seconds and does something drastic if they don't reply.
A lot of this is available haphazardly already, some of it you'd have to write, and some things you'd have to get a little creative with. (Example: Checking if the voice mail system is still up is not impossible, but would take a bit of work.) What I'd recommend to go forward in an "agile" sense is to start plucking low lying fruit: Whatever you current most common problem is that you get from users, write a script to detect it before they do. Then proceed to the next most common problem.
A completely adaptive system that detects everything is probably out of your reach. On the other hand, the number of relatively simple precautions that could be taken and aren't sometimes surprises me. You can reach a happy middle in most cases, I think.