While I cannot comment on the scientific quality of the cited article, I do know that to claim a statement is a lie is to make an accustation of a willful intent to deceive, at least somewhere in the chain of telling and retelling. I find myself doubting this on the part of textbook authors or publishers. And I found no such implication in the article itself - maybe I just missed it.
Also, any claim made in a single paper cannot be considered gospel. Until numerous citations of agreement are published in the scientific literature there is no particular reason to believe or disbelieve the claim - and anonymous posting on slashdot do not, of course, count as citations in the scientific literature.
And, just as those in Mr. Coward's field may very well use the term "lie" differently than the manner in which it is used in the English language as a whole so might engineers consider the terms "resonance" and "vibrational state" to be critically different, while perhaps physicists use "resonance" in a manner that encompasses both terms. I don't know, though I do find myself trying to get my mind around the concept of a vibrational state that is not time dependent.
Criticizing a field outside your own discipline is an activity fraught with peril not the least of which is the differing use of words in different communities. Those who do so over their own signature will generally do so in a spirit of humility, attempting to open a dialog. I think Billah and Scanlan at least approached the proper attitude. Mr. Coward did not even come close.
Have you considered how difficult it is to respond to an email from "anonymous coward"? The billions of emails they would have to send would get them labeled as giga-spammers.
May be bad cinema, but not bad science
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 1
"Scientists" may well be debunking the claim that warming can cause an increase in ice sheets, but "scientists" were also the first to put that theory forth, as a quick Google search will attest. The existence and history of the Atlantic Conveyor was not something that came from the imaginations of movie makers. It was established by good, hard science. While the theory was savaged by many scientists (that's just how science works - you put out a theory and defend it against savage attacks from your peers), it's my understanding that it is now pretty well accepted by most in the community.
What a delightful post. It criticizes someone for making an uninformed attack on Windows, then makes the same kind of attack on the Mac. Well, for the record, I regularly use Macs for playing video, and those problems are indicative of a bad user, not bad software.
Actually, there is no such thing as a bad user, there is only bad software. And let's face it, at this stage in technology there is only bad software. Software repeatedly does what we tell it to do (using an obscure "language" we cannot possibly understand completely), not what we want it to do. Software obstinately refuses to learn from us no matter how loud we scream at it. Software - all software - sucks. Operating systems - all operating systems - suck. Each OS is better at doing some things than others. All OSs that currently exist do enough things well enough to attract a good many users. Some of those users get good enough at the "language" of an OS to be able to get the software to usually do a fairly decent approximation of what they want. Then they forget the effort that went into learning that "language", and get upset when asked to make the same effort for other platforms.
It takes awhile to learn how things work on any platform, and only after that effort has been made can an opinion be considered informed. And anyone who has problems playing video on a Mac either has not made that effort, or has a faulty Mac.
And don't forget the disruption of the Atlantic Conveyor caused by an influx of fresh water, from freshly melted arctic ice. That could cause a small ice age in Europe and eastern North America. We get the best for all worlds: The third world gets growing deserts and the first world gets growing ice fields. And shrinking agricultural fields just about everywhere.
If you want to be really extreme then write the tests first and then write the program that stops the tests from breaking.
What a great idea! Maybe we could wrap this up into a new development method. We could call it something like, oh, maybe extreme programming. I think I'll hurry and patent it before someone else beats me to it.
Yet if every topic of discussion is subjective, this implies that communication is impossible, and clearly it's not. It's a very interesting paradox to try to understand.
That's not a paradox, it's a syllogism:
If every topic of discussion is subjective then communication is impossible.
Communication is not impossible.
Ergo, it is not the case that every topic of discussion is subjective.
Having used KDE, Gnome, CDE, and other Unix GUIs, way back to the early pre-X11 Sun days - I forget what the Sun Marketeers called their windows system - and then using OSX, I think I have to agree with Joel that it took people who came from a culture that emphasized ease of user experience to make a great GUI for Unix.
In the early days of the Mac, Steve Jobs was very vocal about the need for programmers to work extra hard to make the experience pleasant for the end user. Sacrificing programmer pleasure for the sake of the user was a very conscious choice. When Steve moved on to Next, he started to work on making the programmer experience a lot better without losing any of the focus on the end user. With OSX, the successor to Next, he's managed to optimize both values.
When using any Unix GUI other than OSX the very first thing I always do is open an xterm window, and use the GUI only for things that are easier with a GUI. With OSX, I do most things with the GUI and only open a terminal window when I have something to do that's easier to do on a command line. I suspect I'm not alone in these practices, but there are many OSX users who don't even know there's a terminal application, and wouldn't know what to do with it if they ever opened it by mistake.
It's that absolute dedication to being able to do everything from the GUI that sets OSX's GUI apart from all the other Unix GUIs that I have used. Until and unless the other GUI developers embrace that philosophy, their efforts will remain attractive only to those who are comfortable with the command line.
I had a real problem when Gray indicated that there was no real use for a 200G drive. I dedicate a 120G drive to storing photographs I take, and it's nowhere big enough. I would like to have LOTS and LOTS more storage space, but I'm perfectly happy with the access times. When the six megapixels per picture I use become twelve megapixels I'll want even more lots and lots of storage space and maybe a doubling of the access times. One of these days I'll be getting into DV video, and the need for storage will go up even more, while the access time needed to do realtime editing is already here.
I guess that, no matter how smart someone is or how dedicated to keeping on top of what's going on someone will come in out of left field with a use for technology that is completely unexpected ('though I would not have thought that storage of photo or video files would be unexpected).
The CMM, and all other aspects of what is called Software Engineering, are very useful, as long as those weilding them understand their purpose and when it's right to put them aside. The very term Software Engineering is a misnomer, since software develompent is still very much an art. True, it's an art that has a whole lot of craft that goes along with it, but anyone who comes out of the academic world thinking that metrics and engineering are things that can be rigorously applied to software development is going to be more of a danger than an asset.
A well educated developer with good insight into what works in the real world is the ideal. But, given the choice between education and insight, any hiring manager who knew which end was up would choose the insight. The clueless "Engineer" is often chosen, however, because too often the hiring manager is equally clueless and having no other basis for making a choice is dazzled by the degree.
So there's hope for all. Go for the degree! If you also learn how to build systems that work, you'll do well and do good. If not, you'll still be able to land a decent position, and maybe learn on the job.
If the voting terminal was able to ensure that each voter only voted once, then there would be even less of a secret ballot than there is now. While such assurances could be built without compromising voter annonymity, it almost certainly would not be. If you don't think ballot secrecy is important, just consider the time when Ann Coulter is president. Voting against her agenda would be treason.
Better to handle the multiple voting issue outside the machine.
Offices are setup that way because of the limits of the computer.
Offices were set up that way long before the current type of computer ever existed. I was in cubicles with a dumb terminal, with a 3270, and with no automation at all.
If we ever get to the point where workers really do not need any material other than what's accessible with a computer, then we may find the personal workspace disappearing. Or we may not.
I don't think the PAL/NTSC video standard is encoded on the DVD. It would be up to the DVD player to get that right. It's the region code that would be the problem. The US is in region 1 and the UK is in region 2.
Even if you do not have any single application that needs lots of RAM, it doesn't take too many big apps running at the same time to start a system swapping. The more RAM you have, the more apps can run without tedious system delays.
On the other hand,if you're happy running XP on 256M, then you have no reason to change. But I doubt that you run Word and Outlook and Excel and Powerpoint and IE at at the same time you're gaming.
Assuming it's bang/buck, and buck = 0, then bang/buck is Undefined. (division by zero!)
It's been a very long time since I studied number theory (and so I could be remembering incorrectly), but I seem to recall that dividing any number by zero gives a result that is equal to every (rational?) number that exists. And that's a lot more interesting than being undefined.
This would be great if we were running ISO protocols(except that they never really actually worked), which had seven protocol layers. TCP/IP is generally described as having five layers. So how do you filter layer 7 when there are only five layers?
However, directly from their quarterly earnings page...
This looks like something the SEC should be looking into. Making false claims in a lawsuit is one thing - lawyers are expected to be liars in court. Making false declarations on financial statements is something else.
I am humbled. I clearly should have said "any arbitrarily large number short of infinity", rather than "the largest number short of infinity". Hard to keep the terms straight, even for a mathematician, which I'm not.
Isn't "nearly infinite" kinda like "sort of pregnant"? IANAM, but it is my understanding that the very largest number short of infinity is not significantly closer to infinity than 1.
If students are doing the system and network administration, then I don't see how Linux could possibly not be less expensive than any proprietary OS. There's little or no up-front cost, and no ongoing software maintenance cost. Even if there were penalties in the amount of time it took to do things using Linux (a doubtful proposition, in any case), that extra time would be used by the students learning very valuable lessons about computers.
If students are not the admins, why not?
I'll have to remember his name...what's his name?
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is a columnist I'll never have to read again. He's full of himself and full of shit.
I have a large library of movies recorded onto Beta tapes. Entire movies. The idea that people bought VHS because they could record movies on them is patently ridiculous. He, himself notes that movies were first released on Beta - the format he then claims is too small to hold a movie.
Everyone I knew who bought a VHS rather than a Beta machine, back when VHS was winning the marketing war, did so because you could program the VHS machine to record all your favorite programs for a week or two. At least, someone could, presumably. None of the folks I knew who chose VHS for that feature ever, ever used it. Most could never even figure out how to set the clock.
VHS won that war because of better marketing. They came up with a feature with marginal utility (longer tape length) and convinced a whole lot of people that it was essential.
Slashdot Mirror
While I cannot comment on the scientific quality of the cited article, I do know that to claim a statement is a lie is to make an accustation of a willful intent to deceive, at least somewhere in the chain of telling and retelling. I find myself doubting this on the part of textbook authors or publishers. And I found no such implication in the article itself - maybe I just missed it.
Also, any claim made in a single paper cannot be considered gospel. Until numerous citations of agreement are published in the scientific literature there is no particular reason to believe or disbelieve the claim - and anonymous posting on slashdot do not, of course, count as citations in the scientific literature.
And, just as those in Mr. Coward's field may very well use the term "lie" differently than the manner in which it is used in the English language as a whole so might engineers consider the terms "resonance" and "vibrational state" to be critically different, while perhaps physicists use "resonance" in a manner that encompasses both terms. I don't know, though I do find myself trying to get my mind around the concept of a vibrational state that is not time dependent.
Criticizing a field outside your own discipline is an activity fraught with peril not the least of which is the differing use of words in different communities. Those who do so over their own signature will generally do so in a spirit of humility, attempting to open a dialog. I think Billah and Scanlan at least approached the proper attitude. Mr. Coward did not even come close.
Just basic science. Give me a break.
Have you considered how difficult it is to respond to an email from "anonymous coward"? The billions of emails they would have to send would get them labeled as giga-spammers.
"Scientists" may well be debunking the claim that warming can cause an increase in ice sheets, but "scientists" were also the first to put that theory forth, as a quick Google search will attest. The existence and history of the Atlantic Conveyor was not something that came from the imaginations of movie makers. It was established by good, hard science. While the theory was savaged by many scientists (that's just how science works - you put out a theory and defend it against savage attacks from your peers), it's my understanding that it is now pretty well accepted by most in the community.
What a delightful post. It criticizes someone for making an uninformed attack on Windows, then makes the same kind of attack on the Mac. Well, for the record, I regularly use Macs for playing video, and those problems are indicative of a bad user, not bad software.
Actually, there is no such thing as a bad user, there is only bad software. And let's face it, at this stage in technology there is only bad software. Software repeatedly does what we tell it to do (using an obscure "language" we cannot possibly understand completely), not what we want it to do. Software obstinately refuses to learn from us no matter how loud we scream at it. Software - all software - sucks. Operating systems - all operating systems - suck. Each OS is better at doing some things than others. All OSs that currently exist do enough things well enough to attract a good many users. Some of those users get good enough at the "language" of an OS to be able to get the software to usually do a fairly decent approximation of what they want. Then they forget the effort that went into learning that "language", and get upset when asked to make the same effort for other platforms.
It takes awhile to learn how things work on any platform, and only after that effort has been made can an opinion be considered informed. And anyone who has problems playing video on a Mac either has not made that effort, or has a faulty Mac.
Oh, horrors!!! My stock just split, and now the share price is only half what it was yesterday. How could the company have been so inept!?
And don't forget the disruption of the Atlantic Conveyor caused by an influx of fresh water, from freshly melted arctic ice. That could cause a small ice age in Europe and eastern North America. We get the best for all worlds: The third world gets growing deserts and the first world gets growing ice fields. And shrinking agricultural fields just about everywhere.
If you want to be really extreme then write the tests first and then write the program that stops the tests from breaking.
What a great idea! Maybe we could wrap this up into a new development method. We could call it something like, oh, maybe extreme programming. I think I'll hurry and patent it before someone else beats me to it.
Yet if every topic of discussion is subjective, this implies that communication is impossible, and clearly it's not. It's a very interesting paradox to try to understand.
That's not a paradox, it's a syllogism:
If every topic of discussion is subjective then communication is impossible.
Communication is not impossible.
Ergo, it is not the case that every topic of discussion is subjective.
Having used KDE, Gnome, CDE, and other Unix GUIs, way back to the early pre-X11 Sun days - I forget what the Sun Marketeers called their windows system - and then using OSX, I think I have to agree with Joel that it took people who came from a culture that emphasized ease of user experience to make a great GUI for Unix.
In the early days of the Mac, Steve Jobs was very vocal about the need for programmers to work extra hard to make the experience pleasant for the end user. Sacrificing programmer pleasure for the sake of the user was a very conscious choice. When Steve moved on to Next, he started to work on making the programmer experience a lot better without losing any of the focus on the end user. With OSX, the successor to Next, he's managed to optimize both values.
When using any Unix GUI other than OSX the very first thing I always do is open an xterm window, and use the GUI only for things that are easier with a GUI. With OSX, I do most things with the GUI and only open a terminal window when I have something to do that's easier to do on a command line. I suspect I'm not alone in these practices, but there are many OSX users who don't even know there's a terminal application, and wouldn't know what to do with it if they ever opened it by mistake.
It's that absolute dedication to being able to do everything from the GUI that sets OSX's GUI apart from all the other Unix GUIs that I have used. Until and unless the other GUI developers embrace that philosophy, their efforts will remain attractive only to those who are comfortable with the command line.
Steve's comments were his memories of what happened about eighteen months ago. Your numbers are current. If there's any lie here, it's not Steve's.
Best way I've ever seen for saying "They're lying!". The lying liars won't even know they've been accused.
I had a real problem when Gray indicated that there was no real use for a 200G drive. I dedicate a 120G drive to storing photographs I take, and it's nowhere big enough. I would like to have LOTS and LOTS more storage space, but I'm perfectly happy with the access times. When the six megapixels per picture I use become twelve megapixels I'll want even more lots and lots of storage space and maybe a doubling of the access times. One of these days I'll be getting into DV video, and the need for storage will go up even more, while the access time needed to do realtime editing is already here.
I guess that, no matter how smart someone is or how dedicated to keeping on top of what's going on someone will come in out of left field with a use for technology that is completely unexpected ('though I would not have thought that storage of photo or video files would be unexpected).
The CMM, and all other aspects of what is called Software Engineering, are very useful, as long as those weilding them understand their purpose and when it's right to put them aside. The very term Software Engineering is a misnomer, since software develompent is still very much an art. True, it's an art that has a whole lot of craft that goes along with it, but anyone who comes out of the academic world thinking that metrics and engineering are things that can be rigorously applied to software development is going to be more of a danger than an asset.
A well educated developer with good insight into what works in the real world is the ideal. But, given the choice between education and insight, any hiring manager who knew which end was up would choose the insight. The clueless "Engineer" is often chosen, however, because too often the hiring manager is equally clueless and having no other basis for making a choice is dazzled by the degree.
So there's hope for all. Go for the degree! If you also learn how to build systems that work, you'll do well and do good. If not, you'll still be able to land a decent position, and maybe learn on the job.
If the voting terminal was able to ensure that each voter only voted once, then there would be even less of a secret ballot than there is now. While such assurances could be built without compromising voter annonymity, it almost certainly would not be. If you don't think ballot secrecy is important, just consider the time when Ann Coulter is president. Voting against her agenda would be treason.
Better to handle the multiple voting issue outside the machine.
Offices are setup that way because of the limits of the computer.
Offices were set up that way long before the current type of computer ever existed. I was in cubicles with a dumb terminal, with a 3270, and with no automation at all.
If we ever get to the point where workers really do not need any material other than what's accessible with a computer, then we may find the personal workspace disappearing. Or we may not.
I don't think the PAL/NTSC video standard is encoded on the DVD. It would be up to the DVD player to get that right. It's the region code that would be the problem. The US is in region 1 and the UK is in region 2.
Even if you do not have any single application that needs lots of RAM, it doesn't take too many big apps running at the same time to start a system swapping. The more RAM you have, the more apps can run without tedious system delays.
On the other hand,if you're happy running XP on 256M, then you have no reason to change. But I doubt that you run Word and Outlook and Excel and Powerpoint and IE at at the same time you're gaming.
Assuming it's bang/buck, and buck = 0, then bang/buck is Undefined. (division by zero!)
It's been a very long time since I studied number theory (and so I could be remembering incorrectly), but I seem to recall that dividing any number by zero gives a result that is equal to every (rational?) number that exists. And that's a lot more interesting than being undefined.
This would be great if we were running ISO protocols(except that they never really actually worked), which had seven protocol layers. TCP/IP is generally described as having five layers. So how do you filter layer 7 when there are only five layers?
However, directly from their quarterly earnings page...
This looks like something the SEC should be looking into. Making false claims in a lawsuit is one thing - lawyers are expected to be liars in court. Making false declarations on financial statements is something else.
The second thought that pops into my head - will the upgrades be given away too?
Sure, until there's no more reason to.
I am humbled. I clearly should have said "any arbitrarily large number short of infinity", rather than "the largest number short of infinity". Hard to keep the terms straight, even for a mathematician, which I'm not.
Isn't "nearly infinite" kinda like "sort of pregnant"? IANAM, but it is my understanding that the very largest number short of infinity is not significantly closer to infinity than 1.
If students are doing the system and network administration, then I don't see how Linux could possibly not be less expensive than any proprietary OS. There's little or no up-front cost, and no ongoing software maintenance cost. Even if there were penalties in the amount of time it took to do things using Linux (a doubtful proposition, in any case), that extra time would be used by the students learning very valuable lessons about computers.
If students are not the admins, why not?
This is a columnist I'll never have to read again. He's full of himself and full of shit.
I have a large library of movies recorded onto Beta tapes. Entire movies. The idea that people bought VHS because they could record movies on them is patently ridiculous. He, himself notes that movies were first released on Beta - the format he then claims is too small to hold a movie.
Everyone I knew who bought a VHS rather than a Beta machine, back when VHS was winning the marketing war, did so because you could program the VHS machine to record all your favorite programs for a week or two. At least, someone could, presumably. None of the folks I knew who chose VHS for that feature ever, ever used it. Most could never even figure out how to set the clock.
VHS won that war because of better marketing. They came up with a feature with marginal utility (longer tape length) and convinced a whole lot of people that it was essential.