I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 . Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out. But there's a whole world out there that's worth exploring, and it's worth the risk to leave your basement. *** Being able to communicate with other people while traveling makes your life better. *** That's worth something. Listening to the car radio is worth something. Reading the newspaper while driving makes the ride more fun, and is worth something. Each of these items has risk. Some risks are worth the benefit. Others aren't..
Starred the bit I have an issue with.
That's just it -- you AREN'T really communicating with anyone if you are driving at the same time. Go back to the multi-tasking issue. Ninety-nine percent of people aren't driving and communicating. They are driving POORLY and communicating POORLY. Your argument falls apart in a cost-benefit regard due to that.
The only cost-benefit, then, is in the cost because the benefit isn't anything of value in the first place. You can't compare that to staying in the basement to going out into the world, because for one thing, going out into the world doesn't necessarily entail doing two things at once and compromising concentration in doing so.
You go on and on about smart/clever humor and then give a "yuck!" to Frasier?
You probably need to re-read your own post and follow your own advice. Frasier's mostly incredible, exactly in the background, character-driven, inflection sort of way you've gone on ad nauseum about.
Putting what people may or may not be able to figure out about you aside, at what point does the "I don't post anything like that" equate to, "Hm, I don't post ANYTHING very important on Facebook, and it actually takes a bit of CPU-time for me to even decide WHAT to post."
When that point is reached (if it is, at least in part), what are you gaining from Facebook? To put it another way, do the upside/downside ratio on using Facebook. We hear about the downsides all the time, though they don't appear to bother you, and that's cool. However, what is the upside? Furthermore, what upsides are there that you can't have via normal interactions, both virtual and non-virtual?
Does Facebook increase your quality of life, overall?
Everyone may say they are "bored" of facebook but really i've never heard of anyone quitting it.
That's easily fixed then: I quit Facebook after a year, my wife quit Facebook after about nine months, IIRC, and another friend of mine quit Facebook not long after her daughter was born (again, IIRC).
Primary reason for quitting/deletion? Boredom, privacy concerns, and an overwhelming feeling of impersonal pointlessness (not necessarily in that order).
In any case, if you've never heard of anyone quitting it, you most certainly never looked very far along that particular vector of questioning, which I don't assume there would be much reason to do if you are enjoying the site.
Social networking has never interested me much, but during the birth of my child, my wife was in labour for nearly 15 hours. Normally, we would have had all sorts of friends and family trying to ring us or text us or whatever, just to know what was going on. Instead, I opted to tweet various status updates (which were automatically posted on facebook). This turned out to be a brilliant idea (I was just looking for something to do at the time) as people were kept up to date, nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding) and all the messages coming through could be read at our leisure.
It was also just as easy to post up a picture mere minutes after he was born, once again everyone that WANTED to know did and those that didn't could just ignore it. That would never work with email, or IRC or even instant messaging.
Well, if you aren't going to try to set up any privacy boundaries in the first place, then yeah, I suppose Facebook is a pretty decent mechanism.
I recently went through a 48-hour labor (water break to C-section) with my wife (and a couple midwives, 40 hours of that was at home...) You know how many phone calls I got? None. Only a few family members even knew the labor had started, and they knew better than to bother us. Why on earth would you think you need to update everyone every step of the way?
Simple control over information vomit is the first thing that should be thought through in such times. In going straight to "how should I let people know?" you forgot the primary critical-thinking choices/questions from the outset: "Must I let people know?" and "Just because I can do something, should I?" Your communication dilemma wasn't a dilemma at all.
Let's see... I just did a query against a 1.5 GB table (DBF) that has an index file (CDX) of 240 MB. I did an indexed query that returned 435 records or so, and it did it in 1.11 seconds.
So, you are mistaken. Either that, or my machine downloaded 240 MB in under a second. Sorry, our network isn't that fast. *smile*
I don't know much about file servers, but the entire index file does not need to come down. Not sure if that is a boon of the file server or of Foxpro, but I have been fighting that myth for ten years -- Foxpro does NOT pull entire files down...neither the index files nor the data file.
Let's get some other "duh" stuff taken care of. ANY system will be slow if you pull down a lot of data. That's because the data is coming down. It has to traverse the network to become truly local. If it isn't coming down, like some sort of DataReader thingamabob, then OK, it isn't down. But then don't try joiing that table to another local one, because then you'll just have to wait _then_.
Foxpro is incredibly fast. We have custom applications totalling more than 600,000 lines of code. Everything from old DOS-based input screen to an imaging system (scan, classify, viewing) housing more than 5 million images/files across 2 SQL Server databases (yes, VFP does wonders with SQL Server databases as well). The file-based DBF problems arise as they would with any file-based solution: size limits, contention issues, corruption, etc. But we have over 50-60 users regularly pounding our system, a mix of DBF data and SQL Server data, and it works pretty darn well.
Foxpro's other advantage is what it does with client side data. I can read in an XLS file (one line of code), bring in data via a SQL Server query (3 lines of code), and query a local DBF file (one line of code). Each query will reside in it's own local cursor which can then be indexed, browsed etc. Even better, those cursors can then be joined, filtered, and queried to build another cursor with all of that data brought together. I hear Microsoft is still working on a local engine with that kind of power for.NET. It's called LINQ, and it isn't out yet. Foxpro has been doing this stuff for more than 15 years. I've accessed text files, Excel spreadsheets, AS/400 DB2 data, and SQL Server data all at one time and generated reports that can be viewed, printed, and/or exported back to Excel. All coming from million+ row data sources, all heterogenous.
Foxpro has a lot of problems, sure, and I am digging.NET. But I have never seen anything do what Foxpro can do with varied data sources and local cursor speed in 15+ years of business database programming.
And one more time: FOXPRO DOESN'T PULL DOWN THE WHOLE INDEX FILE WHEN DOING QUERIES! *phew* *smile*
I have found over the years that the way I learn, specifically, is by creating change. Take a "Hello World" program, and change it to say, "Hello Frackhead!". You just learned something about literal strings in that given language. Next, change the way variables are assigned, or add an ELSE to an IF loop. Finally, change the way subroutines are called, or change a class that is instantiated to inherit something different (like, override a method or something). If you can learn the debugger in the tool you are using, all the better. The debugger in VB 3.0 taught me a ton, and that made sure I learned the debugger in Delphi, Visual Foxpro, and now Visual Studio the same way.
It's the ultimate in bottom-up learning. Yes, it is basically just a different form of trial and error, and is somewhat haphazard. But if nothing else, it will tell you where you need to bone up, and where you don't need to waste your time. You might find that picking up loops or variable assignment is easy for you, and that you can morph it into something different with ease. Then, you might find you suck at objected-oriented stuff, or have trouble with function/variable scope. The beauty of chipping away with small steps is manifold:
-- It's easy, and you can do it a little at a time. -- It teaches you good skills for debugging and troubleshooting, which is what a LOT of programmers spend a LOT of time doing. -- It let's you learn at your own speed, and you can go as slow or as fast in certain areas as you wish.
To sum this up by summing up the other, much better, posts on this thread:
-- Start small, like a small-yet-mature OSS project. -- Don't fear your own ignorance, just shift that ignorance to a new spot in the code to "play", and make that ignorance go away (it takes time, be patient). -- Have fun with the stuff you learn! If you figure out something cool, play with it for a while, explore it deeply! It will make you happy, teach you more, and prepare you for the next bout of ignorance that is invariably around the corner. *smile*
You can use this methodology at a job or in your free time... Good luck!
After nominating a non-Judge as Supreme Court Justice, George W. Bush announced today that he will be nominating the monocled Monopoly game guy as replacement for Alan Greenspan!
4) A causal chain cannot stretch back infinitely in time ------- Would you say a finitely drawn figure (in other words, it uses a finite amount of ink) cannot stretch on "forever"? Maybe so, but what about a circle? A finite figure with no beginning or end. What if the Universe is such a "closed" construct?
That being said, it was a shame that Kerry let this question go by with such a weak rebuttal. Later, he mentioned the $13,700 gap between lost jobs and salaries of the "re"employed, but he did not hammer it home at all. I think he did mention that higher poverty leading to more Pell grants, though.
Sadly, every time there was a big, fat ZINGER just waiting for Kerry to fire, he tended to just make frontal attacks on the President. There's nothing worse than responding in a way that juuuust misses the soft underbelly of a poorly made argument...
I'd like to second that... A lot of times local record shops will have used CDs for sale AND a better selection. So, if you don't mind the smell of incense *blanket stereotype*, check one out today! *smile*
OK, not sure how Google Desktop crawls through files, but it is apparently done with its "initial" indexing, and none of my development files appear to be searchable. I searched for a very common widget name that should have been found in dozens of text files, and got zero results. Maybe it is still crawling? Can anyone else report on the extent/usefulness of the text indexing?
But the text searching alone is cool in my book. Am waiting for the crawl to reach my development folders, where this tool could search through multiple projects in multiple languages faster than anything else. Provided the code is ASCII, of course...
Yes, that is probably what I am, but I dislike seeing people on cell phone at times because my initial reaction is: Can't you handle SILENCE for even a few minutes?
I am talking about people who are, for example, talking on their cell phone the entire time they are walking around the supermarket. No, they aren't asking what the other person would like to eat. They are saying "Yeah." "What are you watching." "I like vanilla." Meaningless drivel. Are people so afraid of themselves these days that they can't even walk through the supermarket "alone"?
Hey all, just wondering if anyone else is having browser problems in Panther. I had all my home pages set to my.yahoo.com. Mozilla would crash 4 times out of 5 just opening the home page. Safari, 9 times out of 10, and Internet Explorer, every time.
Whan I set my home page to www.carnageblender.com, all come up OK. Of course, if I go to my.yahoo.com from there, same crashes.
The browsers appear to be the only thing acting up, so what is the issue here? Java run time? Is there an update for the JRE I need to grab?
Finally, did anyone try the straight "Upgrade" option when installing Panther? Every place I read said to use the "Archive and Install", and it took me thre evenings to get my system back to the way it was. Would the "Upgrade" option have worked OK, or would I run into upgrade-bloat-hell later on?
What about Apple? How hard would it be to port OSX to the Alpha architecture, or is Alpha stuff just too expensive to try to build a full software/hardware solution from scratch?
I just started drooling when I thought of a Powerbook with an Alpha chip (probably a true pipe-dream considering power consumption, no?) in it...must...clean up...saliva...
Sorry, I have to disagree. Mossberg is NOT always a fair, thoughtful, reviewer. At times he will either step into an area of which he has no idea, or he will base a plus or minus on a quality that may or may not be important to the masses (though he generally touts himself as looking for the common-user benefits).
Take for example a column some months back reviewing the Microsoft XBox. Mr. Mossberg had NEVER reviewed a game console before. Not a Gameboy, not a PSX, nada. But he write a glowing review of the XBox based on the user experience of _his sons_. He didn't even play with it himself, since he conceded that he knew nothing of the arena.
His review made several other mistakes. He did not do any meaningful comparisons to other consoles (since he knew nothing about those except for his children's hearsay), did not try to find any meaningful cons to the XBox system, and did not even compare the most meaningful factor in the console wars (at least for most): available games and exclusive titles.
I have nothing against the XBox (will probably own one if more notable exclusives come out for it), but the review was out of left field. I will acknowledge that this was an aberration for Mr. Mossberg, but since that review I have read his column with a more discerning eye. He does have distinct biases and blinders that have made me realize he is not the "thorough and fair" reviewer I had come to know and love.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 . Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out. But there's a whole world out there that's worth exploring, and it's worth the risk to leave your basement. *** Being able to communicate with other people while traveling makes your life better. *** That's worth something. Listening to the car radio is worth something. Reading the newspaper while driving makes the ride more fun, and is worth something. Each of these items has risk. Some risks are worth the benefit. Others aren't. .
Starred the bit I have an issue with.
That's just it -- you AREN'T really communicating with anyone if you are driving at the same time. Go back to the multi-tasking issue. Ninety-nine percent of people aren't driving and communicating. They are driving POORLY and communicating POORLY. Your argument falls apart in a cost-benefit regard due to that.
The only cost-benefit, then, is in the cost because the benefit isn't anything of value in the first place. You can't compare that to staying in the basement to going out into the world, because for one thing, going out into the world doesn't necessarily entail doing two things at once and compromising concentration in doing so.
Thanks,
JoeK
You go on and on about smart/clever humor and then give a "yuck!" to Frasier?
You probably need to re-read your own post and follow your own advice. Frasier's mostly incredible, exactly in the background, character-driven, inflection sort of way you've gone on ad nauseum about.
Putting what people may or may not be able to figure out about you aside, at what point does the "I don't post anything like that" equate to, "Hm, I don't post ANYTHING very important on Facebook, and it actually takes a bit of CPU-time for me to even decide WHAT to post."
When that point is reached (if it is, at least in part), what are you gaining from Facebook? To put it another way, do the upside/downside ratio on using Facebook. We hear about the downsides all the time, though they don't appear to bother you, and that's cool. However, what is the upside? Furthermore, what upsides are there that you can't have via normal interactions, both virtual and non-virtual?
Does Facebook increase your quality of life, overall?
Everyone may say they are "bored" of facebook but really i've never heard of anyone quitting it.
That's easily fixed then: I quit Facebook after a year, my wife quit Facebook after about nine months, IIRC, and another friend of mine quit Facebook not long after her daughter was born (again, IIRC).
Primary reason for quitting/deletion? Boredom, privacy concerns, and an overwhelming feeling of impersonal pointlessness (not necessarily in that order).
In any case, if you've never heard of anyone quitting it, you most certainly never looked very far along that particular vector of questioning, which I don't assume there would be much reason to do if you are enjoying the site.
^ this,
Social networking has never interested me much, but during the birth of my child, my wife was in labour for nearly 15 hours. Normally, we would have had all sorts of friends and family trying to ring us or text us or whatever, just to know what was going on. Instead, I opted to tweet various status updates (which were automatically posted on facebook). This turned out to be a brilliant idea (I was just looking for something to do at the time) as people were kept up to date, nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding) and all the messages coming through could be read at our leisure.
It was also just as easy to post up a picture mere minutes after he was born, once again everyone that WANTED to know did and those that didn't could just ignore it.
That would never work with email, or IRC or even instant messaging.
Well, if you aren't going to try to set up any privacy boundaries in the first place, then yeah, I suppose Facebook is a pretty decent mechanism.
I recently went through a 48-hour labor (water break to C-section) with my wife (and a couple midwives, 40 hours of that was at home...) You know how many phone calls I got? None. Only a few family members even knew the labor had started, and they knew better than to bother us. Why on earth would you think you need to update everyone every step of the way?
Simple control over information vomit is the first thing that should be thought through in such times. In going straight to "how should I let people know?" you forgot the primary critical-thinking choices/questions from the outset: "Must I let people know?" and "Just because I can do something, should I?" Your communication dilemma wasn't a dilemma at all.
To make sure the person driving the car gets the ticket, of course, instead of just the car's registrant getting the fine?
Thanks,
sutekh137
The soybeans do not require Roundup to grow. They just don't die when sprayed with Roundup, while all the weeds around them die.
Let's see... I just did a query against a 1.5 GB table (DBF) that has an index file (CDX) of 240 MB. I did an indexed query that returned 435 records or so, and it did it in 1.11 seconds.
.NET. It's called LINQ, and it isn't out yet. Foxpro has been doing this stuff for more than 15 years. I've accessed text files, Excel spreadsheets, AS/400 DB2 data, and SQL Server data all at one time and generated reports that can be viewed, printed, and/or exported back to Excel. All coming from million+ row data sources, all heterogenous.
.NET. But I have never seen anything do what Foxpro can do with varied data sources and local cursor speed in 15+ years of business database programming.
So, you are mistaken. Either that, or my machine downloaded 240 MB in under a second. Sorry, our network isn't that fast. *smile*
I don't know much about file servers, but the entire index file does not need to come down. Not sure if that is a boon of the file server or of Foxpro, but I have been fighting that myth for ten years -- Foxpro does NOT pull entire files down...neither the index files nor the data file.
Let's get some other "duh" stuff taken care of. ANY system will be slow if you pull down a lot of data. That's because the data is coming down. It has to traverse the network to become truly local. If it isn't coming down, like some sort of DataReader thingamabob, then OK, it isn't down. But then don't try joiing that table to another local one, because then you'll just have to wait _then_.
Foxpro is incredibly fast. We have custom applications totalling more than 600,000 lines of code. Everything from old DOS-based input screen to an imaging system (scan, classify, viewing) housing more than 5 million images/files across 2 SQL Server databases (yes, VFP does wonders with SQL Server databases as well). The file-based DBF problems arise as they would with any file-based solution: size limits, contention issues, corruption, etc. But we have over 50-60 users regularly pounding our system, a mix of DBF data and SQL Server data, and it works pretty darn well.
Foxpro's other advantage is what it does with client side data. I can read in an XLS file (one line of code), bring in data via a SQL Server query (3 lines of code), and query a local DBF file (one line of code). Each query will reside in it's own local cursor which can then be indexed, browsed etc. Even better, those cursors can then be joined, filtered, and queried to build another cursor with all of that data brought together. I hear Microsoft is still working on a local engine with that kind of power for
Foxpro has a lot of problems, sure, and I am digging
And one more time: FOXPRO DOESN'T PULL DOWN THE WHOLE INDEX FILE WHEN DOING QUERIES! *phew* *smile*
I have found over the years that the way I learn, specifically, is by creating change. Take a "Hello World" program, and change it to say, "Hello Frackhead!". You just learned something about literal strings in that given language. Next, change the way variables are assigned, or add an ELSE to an IF loop. Finally, change the way subroutines are called, or change a class that is instantiated to inherit something different (like, override a method or something). If you can learn the debugger in the tool you are using, all the better. The debugger in VB 3.0 taught me a ton, and that made sure I learned the debugger in Delphi, Visual Foxpro, and now Visual Studio the same way.
It's the ultimate in bottom-up learning. Yes, it is basically just a different form of trial and error, and is somewhat haphazard. But if nothing else, it will tell you where you need to bone up, and where you don't need to waste your time. You might find that picking up loops or variable assignment is easy for you, and that you can morph it into something different with ease. Then, you might find you suck at objected-oriented stuff, or have trouble with function/variable scope. The beauty of chipping away with small steps is manifold:
-- It's easy, and you can do it a little at a time.
-- It teaches you good skills for debugging and troubleshooting, which is what a LOT of programmers spend a LOT of time doing.
-- It let's you learn at your own speed, and you can go as slow or as fast in certain areas as you wish.
To sum this up by summing up the other, much better, posts on this thread:
-- Start small, like a small-yet-mature OSS project.
-- Don't fear your own ignorance, just shift that ignorance to a new spot in the code to "play", and make that ignorance go away (it takes time, be patient).
-- Have fun with the stuff you learn! If you figure out something cool, play with it for a while, explore it deeply! It will make you happy, teach you more, and prepare you for the next bout of ignorance that is invariably around the corner. *smile*
You can use this methodology at a job or in your free time... Good luck!
After nominating a non-Judge as Supreme Court Justice, George W. Bush announced today that he will be nominating the monocled Monopoly game guy as replacement for Alan Greenspan!
Film at 11.
Computer:
"All...your...base...are...belong...to...us."
All in a day's work! Who needs lunch!
Sure, MS is tough, and their next-gen box will rock. But if the expect to get blown by Sony, they might have another thing coming.
Oh, wait. "Blow". Sorry, my bad.
4) A causal chain cannot stretch back infinitely in time
-------
Would you say a finitely drawn figure (in other words, it uses a finite amount of ink) cannot stretch on "forever"? Maybe so, but what about a circle? A finite figure with no beginning or end. What if the Universe is such a "closed" construct?
...only one can survive.
(sorry, just had to quote They Might Be Giants!)
DISCLAIMER: I am voting for Kerry.
That being said, it was a shame that Kerry let this question go by with such a weak rebuttal. Later, he mentioned the $13,700 gap between lost jobs and salaries of the "re"employed, but he did not hammer it home at all. I think he did mention that higher poverty leading to more Pell grants, though.
Sadly, every time there was a big, fat ZINGER just waiting for Kerry to fire, he tended to just make frontal attacks on the President. There's nothing worse than responding in a way that juuuust misses the soft underbelly of a poorly made argument...
I'd like to second that... A lot of times local record shops will have used CDs for sale AND a better selection. So, if you don't mind the smell of incense *blanket stereotype*, check one out today! *smile*
OK, not sure how Google Desktop crawls through files, but it is apparently done with its "initial" indexing, and none of my development files appear to be searchable. I searched for a very common widget name that should have been found in dozens of text files, and got zero results. Maybe it is still crawling? Can anyone else report on the extent/usefulness of the text indexing?
Yes, lots of MS-centric qualities here.
But the text searching alone is cool in my book. Am waiting for the crawl to reach my development folders, where this tool could search through multiple projects in multiple languages faster than anything else. Provided the code is ASCII, of course...
Yes, that is probably what I am, but I dislike seeing people on cell phone at times because my initial reaction is: Can't you handle SILENCE for even a few minutes?
I am talking about people who are, for example, talking on their cell phone the entire time they are walking around the supermarket. No, they aren't asking what the other person would like to eat. They are saying "Yeah." "What are you watching." "I like vanilla." Meaningless drivel. Are people so afraid of themselves these days that they can't even walk through the supermarket "alone"?
If only we could discover the true NAME of the series, we could control how it turns out. Anyone?
Hey all, just wondering if anyone else is having browser problems in Panther. I had all my home pages set to my.yahoo.com. Mozilla would crash 4 times out of 5 just opening the home page. Safari, 9 times out of 10, and Internet Explorer, every time.
Whan I set my home page to www.carnageblender.com, all come up OK. Of course, if I go to my.yahoo.com from there, same crashes.
The browsers appear to be the only thing acting up, so what is the issue here? Java run time? Is there an update for the JRE I need to grab?
Finally, did anyone try the straight "Upgrade" option when installing Panther? Every place I read said to use the "Archive and Install", and it took me thre evenings to get my system back to the way it was. Would the "Upgrade" option have worked OK, or would I run into upgrade-bloat-hell later on?
Now, if I only I had some sort of programming language with which to process this text *throws hands in air*...
If it is the standard, how to they weigh it?
Maybe the weighing apparatus changed...not the mass itself?
Anyone know how they determined the standard is getting "lighter" or less massive?
JoeK
What about Apple? How hard would it be to port OSX to the Alpha architecture, or is Alpha stuff just too expensive to try to build a full software/hardware solution from scratch?
I just started drooling when I thought of a Powerbook with an Alpha chip (probably a true pipe-dream considering power consumption, no?) in it...must...clean up...saliva...
JoeK
Sorry, I have to disagree. Mossberg is NOT always a fair, thoughtful, reviewer. At times he will either step into an area of which he has no idea, or he will base a plus or minus on a quality that may or may not be important to the masses (though he generally touts himself as looking for the common-user benefits).
Take for example a column some months back reviewing the Microsoft XBox. Mr. Mossberg had NEVER reviewed a game console before. Not a Gameboy, not a PSX, nada. But he write a glowing review of the XBox based on the user experience of _his sons_. He didn't even play with it himself, since he conceded that he knew nothing of the arena.
His review made several other mistakes. He did not do any meaningful comparisons to other consoles (since he knew nothing about those except for his children's hearsay), did not try to find any meaningful cons to the XBox system, and did not even compare the most meaningful factor in the console wars (at least for most): available games and exclusive titles.
I have nothing against the XBox (will probably own one if more notable exclusives come out for it), but the review was out of left field. I will acknowledge that this was an aberration for Mr. Mossberg, but since that review I have read his column with a more discerning eye. He does have distinct biases and blinders that have made me realize he is not the "thorough and fair" reviewer I had come to know and love.
JoeK