back when it was win 95 or NT, the was no large established ecosystem that relied on a API and any changes to the UI were clearly better.
20 years later there are billions of users all dreading the thought of something different - and win 7 counts as different. there are hundreds of thousands of developers all thinking the same.
your customers don't want change - but you only make money if you change.
the only thing stopping MS becoming altavista is that MS enables so many critical businesses processes using VBA and until processes change, that won't change.
actually, in the UK, the pensions regulator has very extensive powers to do just about anything that protects the pension fund. this includes preventing mergers, going after foreign parent companies after they have sold the subsidiary, and the directors.
sounds draconian but it is there to protect your 80 yo grannies pension - otherwise you would have to look after her
- they will be networked, this will make them safer in normal use and you should get there faster
however that will provide the average prankster endless fun rerouting you or causing jams
- if some cars are manually driven, you will be able to drive them in such a way that makes an automatic car misbehave (stop)
ignoring the safety bit here
The calculation could have been done on paper / blood on a wall / notches on a stick
and
carried out by throwing dice / abacus / mental arithmetic
by
morons / normal people / genii
If the process was not validated and the results were not checked, why is anyone surprised when it is wrong?
Some areas can be defined as right or wrong by people with good minds and strong opinions - games
Tax and Financial software not so.
At some point in the process $product needs to be validated using $external_process by $people_who_should_know
I am betting this did not happen.
This is the same sort of discussion you get with c++ vs php - the question is what is the job.
basically it should be clear to all that if you design,code,test,doc,release,stop - that is the most efficient approach. say this takes an effort size 1
the trouble is that what is released is probably not what is wanted.
under agile effectively you take a small part of the job and design,code,test,doc,release,stop let the customer loose and then repeat.
repeating this process n times for each 1/n th of the project takes more than effort size 1 as even if you never even look at any part of the code previously written, the tests you are adding and running will - and the whole point of agile is that you iterate toward the true requirement so you will be re-working.
the trouble is that what is released at the end will cost more.
please flame me for stating the obvious, but if you know what you are doing, and what is needed you should use something like waterfall and if you do not know what you are doing/is needed, use agile
Use Qt/ Win32/ Perl/ VB/ GCC - well just about anything
You are using libraries written by someone else.
For Perl it is called CPAN and is an advertised strength.
The only person who arguably does not use a third party library is someone who programs FGPA arrays without a macro assembler.
Engineers do not make their own screws and screwdrivers anymore, and whilst it may well be interesting to do so, the industrial revolution tells us that there are better things to do with our time.
The points made on trying to make integration easier are useful.
No-one knows what intelligence is. If we did, some smart person would have done it by now.
We are not really making much progress towards answering what consciousness is.
This could be because there simply are not the words to define what we are talking about.
After all and with many apologies to Neitzsche 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay codeless'
The best promise / progress I have seen is the brute-force reverse engineering of some brain functions. You do not need to analyse or understand, just copy.
This includes PET scanning of humans in a vegetative state, Seeing what a cat sees through the implantation of electrodes.
I think I read some researcher is just about able to simulate an ant brain with reasonable fidelity.
Simulating a human brain or equivalent will also imply the ability to receive / simulate and process all the inputs and outputs to and from the brain - i.e. you need the body. This is a big job.
Before we get too eager or depressed, remember that people were making experiments on birds - trying to reverse engineer them - for some hundreds of years (Da Vinchi) before we managed to make powered flight work.
One problem for the AI people is that once they solve a problem to any extent, it is not AI anymore!
- remember context sensitive help and text recognition used to be part of AI.
Netbook makers will maximise their profits.
If this is through selling windows / intel they will do just that.
I personally think wintel came along with appropriate inducements.
I also think that they asked themselves - does it play BB Iplayer HD / Youtube HD without stuttering at that price
- and decided to come back when it does.
No point in a 100usd device if it does not work (whatever you define work to mean).
In the UK, if something like this does not work with Iplayer, it will be thought to be broken (ipad).
There was a uk based comic called Warrior that had a recurring character in one of the strips called Zork. I think the character was based on earlier work from another underground comic - possibly us based.
It is not that a good CEO can contribute 200x as much as us, more that a bad CEO can destroy much more than 200x as much and the high pay is seen as insurance against that.
I recommend Nudge by Thaler&Sunstien
The book discusses how people structure defaults for the choices you make, from the positioning of goods in a supermarket to healthcare to choosing a school and (sort of) attempts to describe a philosophy for working out what default is a 'good' default to present. I largely agree with them.
Default choices have been set since time immemorial.
Default religion (in the UK):- Church or England, a few hundred years ago if you chose a non-default religion you may well have experienced adverse consequences.
Obligatory wiki link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
google - 6 ebay - 4 amazon - 6.
The.com is sort of invisible and nowadays expected, which is why it is valuable.
Basically people in the mass do not readily recall things over 9 characters long, but can recall information that is 'chunked'
So flibberty.gibbet will probably be remembered but flibbertygibbet.org probably will not.
Another good analogy is that there are only so many sensible first names and so the chances are that someone else on your office / class has the same first name, but it is unlikely that someone else nearby has the same first/lastname combination.
So, on balance I think this is a potentially good thing
Consider
domino.pizza and domino.ibm and domino.games - you know it makes sense
If one in 1000 postings fail, the programmer does not care- there is a 99.99% success rate
, but as far as that 1 user is concerned, there is a 100% failure.
Slashdot Mirror
back when it was win 95 or NT, the was no large established ecosystem that relied on a API and any changes to the UI were clearly better. 20 years later there are billions of users all dreading the thought of something different - and win 7 counts as different. there are hundreds of thousands of developers all thinking the same. your customers don't want change - but you only make money if you change. the only thing stopping MS becoming altavista is that MS enables so many critical businesses processes using VBA and until processes change, that won't change.
actually, in the UK, the pensions regulator has very extensive powers to do just about anything that protects the pension fund. this includes preventing mergers, going after foreign parent companies after they have sold the subsidiary, and the directors. sounds draconian but it is there to protect your 80 yo grannies pension - otherwise you would have to look after her
- they will be networked, this will make them safer in normal use and you should get there faster
however that will provide the average prankster endless fun rerouting you or causing jams
- if some cars are manually driven, you will be able to drive them in such a way that makes an automatic car misbehave (stop) ignoring the safety bit here
one in wallet / car to turn wifi off
one by front door / hall table to wifi on
The calculation could have been done on paper / blood on a wall / notches on a stick
and
carried out by throwing dice / abacus / mental arithmetic
by
morons / normal people / genii
If the process was not validated and the results were not checked, why is anyone surprised when it is wrong?
Some areas can be defined as right or wrong by people with good minds and strong opinions - games
Tax and Financial software not so.
At some point in the process $product needs to be validated using $external_process by $people_who_should_know
I am betting this did not happen.
mod this as funny better yet sarcasm
hour of the pig quite good v funny
This is the same sort of discussion you get with c++ vs php - the question is what is the job.
basically it should be clear to all that if you design,code,test,doc,release,stop - that is the most efficient approach. say this takes an effort size 1
the trouble is that what is released is probably not what is wanted.
under agile effectively you take a small part of the job and design,code,test,doc,release,stop let the customer loose and then repeat.
repeating this process n times for each 1/n th of the project takes more than effort size 1 as even if you never even look at any part of the code previously written, the tests you are adding and running will - and the whole point of agile is that you iterate toward the true requirement so you will be re-working.
the trouble is that what is released at the end will cost more.
please flame me for stating the obvious, but if you know what you are doing, and what is needed you should use something like waterfall and if you do not know what you are doing/is needed, use agile
Q: a tool optimized for client server crud applications A: powerbuilder
3+3+3 = 9
someone called fishburne posting about gambas what are the chances of that? could be a variable from the poission distribution
Use Qt/ Win32/ Perl/ VB/ GCC - well just about anything You are using libraries written by someone else. For Perl it is called CPAN and is an advertised strength. The only person who arguably does not use a third party library is someone who programs FGPA arrays without a macro assembler. Engineers do not make their own screws and screwdrivers anymore, and whilst it may well be interesting to do so, the industrial revolution tells us that there are better things to do with our time. The points made on trying to make integration easier are useful.
No-one knows what intelligence is. If we did, some smart person would have done it by now.
We are not really making much progress towards answering what consciousness is.
This could be because there simply are not the words to define what we are talking about.
After all and with many apologies to Neitzsche 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay codeless'
The best promise / progress I have seen is the brute-force reverse engineering of some brain functions. You do not need to analyse or understand, just copy.
This includes PET scanning of humans in a vegetative state, Seeing what a cat sees through the implantation of electrodes.
I think I read some researcher is just about able to simulate an ant brain with reasonable fidelity.
Simulating a human brain or equivalent will also imply the ability to receive / simulate and process all the inputs and outputs to and from the brain - i.e. you need the body. This is a big job.
Before we get too eager or depressed, remember that people were making experiments on birds - trying to reverse engineer them - for some hundreds of years (Da Vinchi) before we managed to make powered flight work.
One problem for the AI people is that once they solve a problem to any extent, it is not AI anymore! - remember context sensitive help and text recognition used to be part of AI.
they knew they would be arrested by the grammar police.
Netbook makers will maximise their profits.
If this is through selling windows / intel they will do just that.
I personally think wintel came along with appropriate inducements.
I also think that they asked themselves - does it play BB Iplayer HD / Youtube HD without stuttering at that price - and decided to come back when it does.
No point in a 100usd device if it does not work (whatever you define work to mean).
In the UK, if something like this does not work with Iplayer, it will be thought to be broken (ipad).
There was a uk based comic called Warrior that had a recurring character in one of the strips called Zork. I think the character was based on earlier work from another underground comic - possibly us based.
It is not that a good CEO can contribute 200x as much as us, more that a bad CEO can destroy much more than 200x as much and the high pay is seen as insurance against that.
... Chinese prodigy has hyperdrive in lunchbox ...
sounds like one of those films on bittorrent.
I recommend Nudge by Thaler&Sunstien The book discusses how people structure defaults for the choices you make, from the positioning of goods in a supermarket to healthcare to choosing a school and (sort of) attempts to describe a philosophy for working out what default is a 'good' default to present. I largely agree with them. Default choices have been set since time immemorial. Default religion (in the UK) :- Church or England, a few hundred years ago if you chose a non-default religion you may well have experienced adverse consequences.
Grab the silver lining with both hands!
Obligatory wiki link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two .com is sort of invisible and nowadays expected, which is why it is valuable.
google - 6 ebay - 4 amazon - 6.
The
Basically people in the mass do not readily recall things over 9 characters long, but can recall information that is 'chunked'
So flibberty.gibbet will probably be remembered but flibbertygibbet.org probably will not.
Another good analogy is that there are only so many sensible first names and so the chances are that someone else on your office / class has the same first name, but it is unlikely that someone else nearby has the same first/lastname combination.
So, on balance I think this is a potentially good thing
Consider
domino.pizza and domino.ibm and domino.games - you know it makes sense
well, about 5000 such chips would do the job.
If one in 1000 postings fail, the programmer does not care- there is a 99.99% success rate , but as far as that 1 user is concerned, there is a 100% failure.
... though which 10 you never can tell.
1 Go to your local newsagent, supermarket, post office, church - whatever
2 Ask if you can put up a notice
If yes, job done.
If they all refuse, perhaps a notice that rates the top 10 brothels/crack suppliers in town is a bit non-u in your cultural context.