This sort of unexpected rounding problem is why real calculations that can cost money or down planes is never done in hardware floating point. You write a floating point representation library that does everything with integer storage and finite precision that is controlled in the library. Then when you move from machine to machine and OS to OS you know that it's always going to behave the same way. This is what we did when I worked for a big financial market data firm. Same integer-based code on Windoze/Solaris/DEC Alpha/MVS. Limited precision is a fair trade off for known accuracy and predictability.
It's true, you can be a competent computer professional without a computer degree. But look at it this way. It's the computer scientists who are writing all those books you buy at Borders to learn how to do it.
Some of spent college years playing the classic board games - Axis and Allies, Risk, Squad Leader, and others of the sort. They had a map or board and dozens of little cardboard squares. There were dozens of them in the old game and hobby shops. We'd have a board set up for weeks, playing turns between classes, leaving notes for the next player to walk in. There were several turn-based computer games around too. Empires was a favorite. Some of us still love the old board games and have never found computer versions to have the same appeal.
Yours is a point I agree with entirely. When most people talk about preserving the Earth what they usually mean is preserving an Earth where Man can thrive. The Earth doesn't need protecting. It'll manage in the same fashion it has for millions of years. Man on the other hand is, in the cosmic measure, probably a flash in the pan like so many other species who have faded into dust. We'll have our day, and it will end, and something else will move to the top.
You are assuming that a single gene should control race. I'd guess that race is a factor of genes for skin color (which is in itself probably controlled by many genes), body frame, muscle features, hair features. I'd guess that race IS recorded in the genes, but not so simply as a single multi-valued switch. You have to switch and combine a number of features to get a particular overwhelming result.
Simple genetic behavior that reacted to a single mutation would be such a fragile system that it would most surely die a quick death. The fact that life has evolved continuously is due to the fact that reaction to genetic anomolies are not generally drastic. I'm sure most organisms are living today with genetic attributes which, combined with (or deprived of) other factors, are not generally supportive to life. But the fact that they are masked by other genetic factors allows these to be overcome, allowing for the proliferation of life. For example, you may have a gene that limits your overall lung capacity, but your genes for a large body frame may offset that enough to let you live. Who knows what other offsetting combinations may be out there.
Unfortunately, those factors may be what makes genetic tampering so dangerous.
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
As long as I am bigger than you, we will never be equals. As long as I have the girl you want, we will never be equals. As long as I am in line before you, we will never be equals.
Human nature will never allow a "wealthy society of equals".
Keep dreaming, Alice. Wonderland is right around the corner.
I'm going to start a collection of great pieces of code and display them downtown at my new Code Gallery. I'll have a few pieces of Kernigan and Ritchie, a Linus or two. Maybe some local coder's pieces, and some of my own.
But then, I'm sure I'd run out of open source stuff that I can display without selling licenses for each piece.
In my work we produce similar online purchasing sites for several clients from a single database of catalog items. I can produce a single XML file representing the catalog (using Xerces) and apply different style sheets(using Xalan) to produce custom purchasing sites within a matter of hours rather than weeks. I admit that they are hardly simple and straight forward libraries, but once you have the clues they have everything you need.
The clone would only be screwed up because of the ideas of identity imposed by others. As in the case of non-traditional families today, it is often from the outside that the damage is done. The non-approving intrude, accuse, and chastise where they have no business. Those with no reason to have an opinion judge without thought of the impact of their sentence.
In the case of cloned historical figures, it would be the expectations of others that would most likely cause the most damage, and this is not a new phenomenon. Consider the children of sports greats who decide to follow their footsteps.
Your post leads me to believe that you have already judged everyone who might want to consider cloning. You seem to assume that it could only be a thing of amusement. Such a thoughtless judgement is what would sentence the cloned individual to an identity crisis. It probably would not be the 'parents'.
The biggest hurdles that cloning has to clear are those that are constructed from the prejudice, intolerance, and fear of the religious right. The discussion of the sanctity of life and its creation is already at the foreground because of the debate about abortion. The debate now is whether the aborted fetus has a soul. The debaters now discuss with ferver because the subject has no voice. When the subject shifts from an unborn fetus to a living individual the debate takes on a whole new tone. The religious right will not be championing for the rights of one denied, but denying the rights to one who has been born. Are they going to look into the individual's eyes and argue that he or she should not have been born? When that first clone is born they must take a stance. Either the religious community will be split, or it will be split from the rest of the community. I personally look forward to that event.
The Bible open? You've got to be kidding. The Bible was compiled in the 5th century. Efforts to change or reinterpret the Bible lead to the arguments between Rome and Constantinople that eventually lead to the division of Christianity into Eastern and Western subsects. Much of it was over one little phrase about whether the Holy Spirit descends from the Father and the Son or just from the Father. I'd imagine that some 'Open Source mentality' might have let that slide. Rather it lead centuries of war between Eastern and Western Europe that we're still seeing today.
I've just finished reading three texts that I've downloaded for viewing on my Palm Pilot. The text wasn't as easy to read as a paperback. I had to do a lot more 'paging' to get through it. But there were some nice things about it. Since I had my Palm with me throughout the day I could read a few 'pages' before my next meeting started. I read about a chapter as I waited for my wife to complete her shopping. I'd never carry my latest novel to a meeting or even in the car, but my Palm is there almost all the time. I can carry several novels in the Palm, so I can move on to the next as I finish one. I can beam them to my friends with Palms. I don't do a lot of reading of new materials, so for a while I can live with the selection I'm finding for the Palm, and the Project Gutenberg list has a bunch of texts that I can translate for Palm reading. I think if it's an integral part of my PDA or whatever device I'm carrying all day the e-book of sorts could be a fairly usable item.
At this point the damage is done, and there's no going back. Take what you can get.
The destruction of such a wonder may be a disappointment, but it is hardly a catastrophy. The Earth has been here a long time, and it will be for longer still. It's continuously renewing itself, and will continue to do so, long after we've done our worst to take advantage of what it has to offer.
Conservation and appreciation for nature is a proper and respectful. Sadly though, most of what conservationists are trying to preserve is Man and his ability to pillage the Earth without paying the price.
I think M$ mostly BUYS games from small developers and takes all the credit. You ever notice all those opening splash screens when you start a M$ game? The ones that talk about who really develped it?
How silly is M$ going to look in a few years when.NET has no context because we've moved on to a new URL spec?
And besides, I don't want to use or even talk about anything that causes me to use punctuation as the first character of a sentence when I use as the first word. I think M$ just used it to piss off any one writing a word processor.
.NET needs to die early so we don't have to write much about it.
I've read this post and most of its replies, and there is one flaw in all of it that you can see in most arguments about education. Everyone always asks, "What's the single best way to teach everyone to know everything?" If your goal is to make everyone who attends school a master of all subjects you are doomed to fail.
It has ALWAYS been the case that the top 20% (or whatever percentage you like) makes up for the rest. Those people will be the capable people no matter how you teach them. It is this group that runs the government, makes the next great scientific breakthrough, and writes the next great American novel.
The next 20% can with help reach 80% of the top capacity. They carry on with whatever they find themselves doing and think, "If I had studied more I could have made something of myself."
The next 40% can reach 60% and carry on happilty with whatever they get. The rest are doomed. It doesn't matter how you teach them. You'll never reach them.
Until education learns to tailor application to student capability it will always be viewed as inefficient at best and at worst a failure.
Aren't you something! Post a bucket of piss and bad attitude and don't event sign your name! If you've got a gripe that you think is worth our hearing you should at least be proud enough to tell us who you are. If you're not, you're just another whiny bastard who thinks I should give a sh*t.
It's not an American thing, it's an ignorant American thing. Typing as the standard mode of conversation has exposed the sorry nature of grammar and spelling in the US. Sadly though, most offenders are too ignorant to be embarrassed.
We lived for years with a segregated on-line society. In those years Compuserve, Genie, AOL, and whatever BBS you subscribed to refused to work together. The big revolution, and big payoff, came when WWW brought everything together. If MS and NS communities can't learn from those proprietary nets that fought and died to the web, they'll go the same way, to the next big thing that again brings the on-line community together. We users will pay for it for a short time, but the dividing camps will eventually pay big in the long run.
Any large company with any sizeable enterprise systems has a huge network and system monitoring setup. If you can't run multiple displays on a single PC you have dozens of PCs stacked up doing nothing more than running an X display or other GUI monitoring window.
PCs aren't just for Quake any more . ..
When it hits the fan . . .
on
CS vs CIS
·
· Score: 1
When your mission critical code that you've just ported to a new platform starts going haywire, grab your CS guy, cause the CIS guy is going to say "What's a compiler switch? What do you mean by optimized? It's not on my flowchart."
And all that math? It pays off when your code takes hours instead of seconds. If you can't quantify the complexity in a piece of code how are you going to know how to fix it?
Don't ever trust a programmer who hasn't written assembler code for at least a semester.
Imagine how sad it would be for us if that self-proclaimed winner could roll into the capital with his troops and take over the government without the marvelous due process that we're seeing in the courts.
This election might not sound so great when described in cheap sound bites, but as an example of mechanisms of the US government and the rule of law, and of the respect that US citizens have for its government, there can be nothing better.
In the end, we will have a properly elected president according to the laws of the nation. Those laws may be quickly revised to prevent a recurrence of these precedings, but those laws are all we have, and all we can do right now is exercise them.
As a *nix developer and system specialist, I already have to know the difference between HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, et. al. While each are similar, coding an application for each requires knowing the caveats of each and using tons of #ifdef statements. Why should the idea of Linux fragmentation be any scarier?
I have recently been working to find a problem on a multi-platform middleware product that behaves perfectly (as predicted) on three platforms, but misbehaves terribly on another. All the code is written according to accepted standards, using the same standards-based libraries.
I've 'engineered' my code properly. It still won't work properly on one platform, and there is nothing I can do about it. Do 'Real engineers' run into problems of this sort, where gravity or electromagnetic phenomena don't behave properly in one state or another? Do your models for bridges hold up on the Moon or Saturn? That's the kind of world we work in with software. It's building on quicksand.
I had a similar situation, but as valedictorian. I hated my school and my classmates (all 18 of them). I simply wanted to skip the ceremonyand end my high school experience as quickly as possible. When I told the administration my wishes they threatened me. They told me that if I didn't show up and if I didn't make a good speech I'd not get my diploma. I skipped all the rehearsals and didn't give them a copy of my speech, which is generally required.
In the end I did go to the ceremony, and basically my speech said that the rest of my class was a bunch of lazy losers and that with the teachers we had it was lucky anyone ever got to college from there.
I got a lecture afterward, but did get the diploma. Even though I was the only one going to college, I didn't get the alumni scholarship. It wasn't awarded that year.
This is what you get if you don't want to participate.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of unexpected rounding problem is why real calculations that can cost money or down planes is never done in hardware floating point. You write a floating point representation library that does everything with integer storage and finite precision that is controlled in the library. Then when you move from machine to machine and OS to OS you know that it's always going to behave the same way. This is what we did when I worked for a big financial market data firm. Same integer-based code on Windoze/Solaris/DEC Alpha/MVS. Limited precision is a fair trade off for known accuracy and predictability.
It's true, you can be a competent computer professional without a computer degree. But look at it this way. It's the computer scientists who are writing all those books you buy at Borders to learn how to do it.
Some of spent college years playing the classic board games - Axis and Allies, Risk, Squad Leader, and others of the sort. They had a map or board and dozens of little cardboard squares. There were dozens of them in the old game and hobby shops. We'd have a board set up for weeks, playing turns between classes, leaving notes for the next player to walk in. There were several turn-based computer games around too. Empires was a favorite. Some of us still love the old board games and have never found computer versions to have the same appeal.
Yours is a point I agree with entirely. When most people talk about preserving the Earth what they usually mean is preserving an Earth where Man can thrive. The Earth doesn't need protecting. It'll manage in the same fashion it has for millions of years. Man on the other hand is, in the cosmic measure, probably a flash in the pan like so many other species who have faded into dust. We'll have our day, and it will end, and something else will move to the top.
You are assuming that a single gene should control race. I'd guess that race is a factor of genes for skin color (which is in itself probably controlled by many genes), body frame, muscle features, hair features. I'd guess that race IS recorded in the genes, but not so simply as a single multi-valued switch. You have to switch and combine a number of features to get a particular overwhelming result.
Simple genetic behavior that reacted to a single mutation would be such a fragile system that it would most surely die a quick death. The fact that life has evolved continuously is due to the fact that reaction to genetic anomolies are not generally drastic. I'm sure most organisms are living today with genetic attributes which, combined with (or deprived of) other factors, are not generally supportive to life. But the fact that they are masked by other genetic factors allows these to be overcome, allowing for the proliferation of life. For example, you may have a gene that limits your overall lung capacity, but your genes for a large body frame may offset that enough to let you live. Who knows what other offsetting combinations may be out there.
Unfortunately, those factors may be what makes genetic tampering so dangerous.
As long as I am bigger than you, we will never be equals. As long as I have the girl you want, we will never be equals. As long as I am in line before you, we will never be equals.
Human nature will never allow a "wealthy society of equals".
Keep dreaming, Alice. Wonderland is right around the corner.
I'm going to start a collection of great pieces of code and display them downtown at my new Code Gallery. I'll have a few pieces of Kernigan and Ritchie, a Linus or two. Maybe some local coder's pieces, and some of my own.
But then, I'm sure I'd run out of open source stuff that I can display without selling licenses for each piece.
In my work we produce similar online purchasing sites for several clients from a single database of catalog items. I can produce a single XML file representing the catalog (using Xerces) and apply different style sheets(using Xalan) to produce custom purchasing sites within a matter of hours rather than weeks. I admit that they are hardly simple and straight forward libraries, but once you have the clues they have everything you need.
The clone would only be screwed up because of the ideas of identity imposed by others. As in the case of non-traditional families today, it is often from the outside that the damage is done. The non-approving intrude, accuse, and chastise where they have no business. Those with no reason to have an opinion judge without thought of the impact of their sentence.
In the case of cloned historical figures, it would be the expectations of others that would most likely cause the most damage, and this is not a new phenomenon. Consider the children of sports greats who decide to follow their footsteps.
Your post leads me to believe that you have already judged everyone who might want to consider cloning. You seem to assume that it could only be a thing of amusement. Such a thoughtless judgement is what would sentence the cloned individual to an identity crisis. It probably would not be the 'parents'.
The biggest hurdles that cloning has to clear are those that are constructed from the prejudice, intolerance, and fear of the religious right. The discussion of the sanctity of life and its creation is already at the foreground because of the debate about abortion. The debate now is whether the aborted fetus has a soul. The debaters now discuss with ferver because the subject has no voice. When the subject shifts from an unborn fetus to a living individual the debate takes on a whole new tone. The religious right will not be championing for the rights of one denied, but denying the rights to one who has been born. Are they going to look into the individual's eyes and argue that he or she should not have been born? When that first clone is born they must take a stance. Either the religious community will be split, or it will be split from the rest of the community. I personally look forward to that event.
The Bible open? You've got to be kidding. The Bible was compiled in the 5th century. Efforts to change or reinterpret the Bible lead to the arguments between Rome and Constantinople that eventually lead to the division of Christianity into Eastern and Western subsects. Much of it was over one little phrase about whether the Holy Spirit descends from the Father and the Son or just from the Father. I'd imagine that some 'Open Source mentality' might have let that slide. Rather it lead centuries of war between Eastern and Western Europe that we're still seeing today.
I've just finished reading three texts that I've downloaded for viewing on my Palm Pilot. The text wasn't as easy to read as a paperback. I had to do a lot more 'paging' to get through it. But there were some nice things about it. Since I had my Palm with me throughout the day I could read a few 'pages' before my next meeting started. I read about a chapter as I waited for my wife to complete her shopping. I'd never carry my latest novel to a meeting or even in the car, but my Palm is there almost all the time. I can carry several novels in the Palm, so I can move on to the next as I finish one. I can beam them to my friends with Palms. I don't do a lot of reading of new materials, so for a while I can live with the selection I'm finding for the Palm, and the Project Gutenberg list has a bunch of texts that I can translate for Palm reading. I think if it's an integral part of my PDA or whatever device I'm carrying all day the e-book of sorts could be a fairly usable item.
At this point the damage is done, and there's no going back. Take what you can get.
The destruction of such a wonder may be a disappointment, but it is hardly a catastrophy. The Earth has been here a long time, and it will be for longer still. It's continuously renewing itself, and will continue to do so, long after we've done our worst to take advantage of what it has to offer.
Conservation and appreciation for nature is a proper and respectful. Sadly though, most of what conservationists are trying to preserve is Man and his ability to pillage the Earth without paying the price.
Nature ALWAYS wins.
I think M$ mostly BUYS games from small developers and takes all the credit. You ever notice all those opening splash screens when you start a M$ game? The ones that talk about who really develped it?
How silly is M$ going to look in a few years when .NET has no context because we've moved on to a new URL spec?
And besides, I don't want to use or even talk about anything that causes me to use punctuation as the first character of a sentence when I use as the first word. I think M$ just used it to piss off any one writing a word processor.
.NET needs to die early so we don't have to write much about it.
I've read this post and most of its replies, and there is one flaw in all of it that you can see in most arguments about education. Everyone always asks, "What's the single best way to teach everyone to know everything?" If your goal is to make everyone who attends school a master of all subjects you are doomed to fail.
It has ALWAYS been the case that the top 20% (or whatever percentage you like) makes up for the rest. Those people will be the capable people no matter how you teach them. It is this group that runs the government, makes the next great scientific breakthrough, and writes the next great American novel.
The next 20% can with help reach 80% of the top capacity. They carry on with whatever they find themselves doing and think, "If I had studied more I could have made something of myself."
The next 40% can reach 60% and carry on happilty with whatever they get. The rest are doomed. It doesn't matter how you teach them. You'll never reach them.
Until education learns to tailor application to student capability it will always be viewed as inefficient at best and at worst a failure.
Aren't you something! Post a bucket of piss and bad attitude and don't event sign your name! If you've got a gripe that you think is worth our hearing you should at least be proud enough to tell us who you are. If you're not, you're just another whiny bastard who thinks I should give a sh*t.
It's not an American thing, it's an ignorant American thing. Typing as the standard mode of conversation has exposed the sorry nature of grammar and spelling in the US. Sadly though, most offenders are too ignorant to be embarrassed.
We lived for years with a segregated on-line society. In those years Compuserve, Genie, AOL, and whatever BBS you subscribed to refused to work together. The big revolution, and big payoff, came when WWW brought everything together. If MS and NS communities can't learn from those proprietary nets that fought and died to the web, they'll go the same way, to the next big thing that again brings the on-line community together. We users will pay for it for a short time, but the dividing camps will eventually pay big in the long run.
Any large company with any sizeable enterprise systems has a huge network and system monitoring setup. If you can't run multiple displays on a single PC you have dozens of PCs stacked up doing nothing more than running an X display or other GUI monitoring window.
.
PCs aren't just for Quake any more . .
When your mission critical code that you've just ported to a new platform starts going haywire, grab your CS guy, cause the CIS guy is going to say "What's a compiler switch? What do you mean by optimized? It's not on my flowchart."
And all that math? It pays off when your code takes hours instead of seconds. If you can't quantify the complexity in a piece of code how are you going to know how to fix it?
Don't ever trust a programmer who hasn't written assembler code for at least a semester.
Imagine how sad it would be for us if that self-proclaimed winner could roll into the capital with his troops and take over the government without the marvelous due process that we're seeing in the courts.
This election might not sound so great when described in cheap sound bites, but as an example of mechanisms of the US government and the rule of law, and of the respect that US citizens have for its government, there can be nothing better.
In the end, we will have a properly elected president according to the laws of the nation. Those laws may be quickly revised to prevent a recurrence of these precedings, but those laws are all we have, and all we can do right now is exercise them.
As a *nix developer and system specialist, I already have to know the difference between HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, et. al. While each are similar, coding an application for each requires knowing the caveats of each and using tons of #ifdef statements. Why should the idea of Linux fragmentation be any scarier?
I have recently been working to find a problem on a multi-platform middleware product that behaves perfectly (as predicted) on three platforms, but misbehaves terribly on another. All the code is written according to accepted standards, using the same standards-based libraries.
I've 'engineered' my code properly. It still won't work properly on one platform, and there is nothing I can do about it. Do 'Real engineers' run into problems of this sort, where gravity or electromagnetic phenomena don't behave properly in one state or another? Do your models for bridges hold up on the Moon or Saturn? That's the kind of world we work in with software. It's building on quicksand.
I had a similar situation, but as valedictorian. I hated my school and my classmates (all 18 of them). I simply wanted to skip the ceremonyand end my high school experience as quickly as possible. When I told the administration my wishes they threatened me. They told me that if I didn't show up and if I didn't make a good speech I'd not get my diploma. I skipped all the rehearsals and didn't give them a copy of my speech, which is generally required. In the end I did go to the ceremony, and basically my speech said that the rest of my class was a bunch of lazy losers and that with the teachers we had it was lucky anyone ever got to college from there. I got a lecture afterward, but did get the diploma. Even though I was the only one going to college, I didn't get the alumni scholarship. It wasn't awarded that year. This is what you get if you don't want to participate.