Entire piece is also educational. So even if you argue that it isn't supposed to be satire (which it might not be), it's still specifically for the purpose of education.
Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this...speed trumps price just about every time.
I could be wrong, but are you implying that people will use this because it's got 160Mbit/sec write time? Keep in mind that this is 20MB/sec. That's a little low for the standard harddrive, and you can increase it by adding more drives in a sequential raid. If that's the speed, then it absolutely isn't a good reason to use this.
The only advantage this actually has is information density. One 600GB disc is going to be pretty tiny compared to an array of harddrives designed to get the speed up.
Is that worth it for a library or bank? My inclination would be no. A couple hundred harddrives in a SAN is probably a better idea.
The market will be those individuals that absolutely, positively need the discs to be tiny, and nothing else matters. Because this tech isn't going to do anything else better than what we've already got.
he cannot be expected to be an expert in every subject
This is not about expertise. It's about basic literacy. This is an age where vast stores of knowledge are transferred over the internet, and an inability to use it is pretty close to an inability to read.
It means you can't get to the knowledge that most people can.
It means that you can't be as informed as those around you.
And if your job is to be generally knowledgeable about the world so that you can make wise decisions on any subject someone gives you with a bit of research, you're not in the right position.
If he was an expert in the law, but couldn't read, would that be okay? What about if he was an expert in the law but an idiot savant? Or an expert, but deaf, dumb, and blind? Or remembered everything about law, but otherwise couldn't remember anything longer than 10 minutes?
I refuse to believe that being a judge is all about knowing law. They need to have knowledge flowing into them like a river so that they can see the currents. Otherwise, they'll make myopic decisions.
...because it is true of Eastern Canada is the fallacy of composition.
"Sodium and Chloride are both dangerous to humans. Therefore any combination of sodium and chloride will be dangerous to humans."
That is also a fallacy of composition. I have found a counterexample to the fact that your claim is the fallacy of composition; clearly there are others, and therefore your statement is false.
So the GP must be right: we're not in the middle of an ice age.
P.S. I'm thinking of forming a new core of uptight jerks here at Slashdot. Grammar Nazis should be the only ones. The time of the Logic Fascists is at hand!
standardizing on hydrogen fuel cells and renewable energies...which will be charged off of the power grid (which in the US means coal) at a much higher rate.
while turning Saskatewan into a farm belt with greenhouse gases
Did you mean Saskatchewan? At any rate, coal burning is worse. Getting off of coal is way more important than getting off the gasoline. Removing American dependence upon foreign oil would be nice for Americans (like me), though.
What? Seriously? That ended for me somewhere around third grade...when I realized that my teacher had a grasp of mathematics only a few years beyond mine...which wasn't enough to answer my questions. Of course, what really destroyed it was learning that the simplifications of science we were being taught was such a simplification that the answers were actually wrong.
At what point does enough critical thinking kick in so that you don't trust what your teachers tell you anymore?
Did that not happen for you?
You could be right about the other stuff...but I don't know. 300 little deaths? Why not 20? Why not 600? They're evenly divided by the second, are they? Remember, the guy wasn't actually there. The fear of death was of the possibility of it, not eminent death.
From TFA: night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park
Five minutes. Kids can't handle five minutes of fear in a weekend of great experiences? And we're not even talking about seeing something horrible. They were told there was a gunman, and that they didn't know where he was. This is something that brings events like the Virginia shootings into reality. It's not just something that they saw on TV. Now they know how it felt for five minutes. They can imagine how bad it would be for hours. Maybe they can even relate to kids who go to schools that are bad enough that they know that in going they are risking their lives.
A measure of empathy will do more good than harm, I think.
IMHO, the research dollars would be better spent on developing a process to grow "natural" blood.
IMHO, the research dollars would be better spend on developing a means where I can fly using the power of my mind. Because that's cool.
I know that it'll cost a lot more than the other thing, and maybe isn't possible, but I'd much rather have that. Those boring pragmatists striving after achievable goals need to start thinking about what I want.
Honestly i think that any research into the artificial growth of body parts, (like what has been done with mice and ears) is a step in the right direction.
Actually, what they need to do is watch X-Men. That will give them an idea of what I'm going for. We can start with being able to create flames from my mind and work up from there. While I'm not a biologist, and don't know anything about how these powers are going to be developed, it's probably a step in the right direction.
What are we waiting for? We need to get to work on this. Those mental flying powers aren't going to design themselves.
I don't have any direct experience either. I just took high school physics and paid attention. Of course, you may not buy that. If you've ever bought an epass, or some electronic mechanism for getting through tolls, you'll notice that they give you a bag that you can put the thing in if you don't want it to register...
without the, uh, thing.
Well, the thing is water and electricity proof, and fairly resistent to heat, light, and vibration.
You don't need to replace a cd every three years...unlike a harddrive. I'd be happy to get programs in other formats, or get media in other things, but I can't. CDs are the best things I can get. I'd really prefer to have a magical machine that would let me stamp my own HD-DVDs, but that's probably not going to happen, so I will continue to buy media in CD and DVD format stamped by other people.
If by "elegant" you mean "extremely easy to subvert," then yes.
Obviously, RFID tags use radio waves. It's in the name. So all you have to do is put the things in a faraday's cage, and no radio waves can get in or out.
In other words, wrap the CDs in foil or put them in foil bags and they won't go off. It's not even illegal to walk around a store with such a bag in your pocket, so how are they going to tell if you're going to use it to walk out with a CD in your pocket?
The only way we could really get around this is by using something that passes through everything that you could put them in.
AFAIK there is nothing like that. We can't use any kind of RF; faraday's cage gets around those easily.
We can't use sound; a huge number of materials absorb sound.
We can't use any kind of exotic particles that go through most materials because for the most part we can't emit or detect them.
How about just putting a gigantic bar on each CD that won't fit through the doors until they're removed?
Not terribly convenient for shoppers, but it'd work.
Of course, you could just have the actual CDs at the checkout counter and only get them handed to you after you paid, but I think that would actually cost more for brick-and-morter shops than the thefts do.
While the biology of neurons is not entirely understood we can at least say these things:
1) Cells die all over the brain all the time. 2) All cells are stateful - i.e., they all "remember" something. 3) Most of the cells are "rewriteable." It's possible that parts of all of them are.
Given this, I'm gonna have to go out on a limb and say that you actually do forget things. Occasionally, you have a cell die that can trigger other memories, but you also flat-out lose the memories (remember, you lose cells from all parts of your brain).
However, it's not as black-and-white as that because the brain stores memories in analog. Think of it kind of like a jpeg image - as you lose cells, a memory gets fuzzier the same way that a low-quality jpeg is fuzzier than a high quality one. (At least, this is how we think it works because this is how our models that do the same thing work).
So what happens when a low quality memory is brought to the surface? It's "rendered" imperfectly. So you get these "unlocked" memories that can't really be trusted because cells that made them up have died or been changed so much as to be the same.
You know what else really helps that? Having standard-sized screens. Up until recently, laptop LCDs were many different sizes.
While most of the smaller sizes come in various settings, the biggest - 17" and 15.4" are both pretty much one size. You don't get manufacturers making 16.7", etc.
And whenever something like that happens, parts start becoming standardized. And they are.
In two years there probably will be lots of places to buy generic replacement LCD screens for your 15.4" or 17" laptop screens.
That's like saying that if only we lived in sterile white rooms all our lives, we wouldn't need health insurance..
More like saying that all doctors should also be nutritionists, since what he's actually saying is that all the code-writers should be the security industry.
The initial statement seems to imply that he's saying that we should eliminate the industry. That's obviously a bit extreme, and I'm sure that there are going to be lots of people who will blow apart that strawman argument.
The more important point is that if most programmers programmed with security in mind, it'd be much easier. We wouldn't have programming languages designed like PHP, or OSes designed like Windows.
Sure we might get the occasional slip-up, but it wouldn't have the horrible design flaws that we're all paying hugely to fix now.
The big thing about most of it is that while no one's perfect, and flaws will come up, but with hardened designs, most won't be exploitable.
You mean, for example, remapping the unlink calls to libc to actually move things to ~/Trash?
Surely you wouldn't want that on all accounts. Only for users. It'd be chaos if every single script on your computer that generated temp files had them moved rather than deleted. How about putting it into the.bashrc (or.zshrc, or whatever) file to be loaded using the preload trick?
That way, all users that have that.bashrc file can have it on, and everything else won't.
something I've always been missing on Linux It works like a charm. I've been using it for years. It's available as a package in most distros, and has been for quite a long time.
I should also note that it can be implemented systemwide - so that *everything* is used that way. But that's a good way to kill your system. Your computer sometimes needs to delete things.
The problem is that Flash doesn't integrate in with anything ASP or.NET....or anything else, and it pretty much is based around fixed screen sizes, and that EMCAScript is a horrible language to do anything really heavy in because of a lack of an inbuilt inheritance structure, module loading, or really namespaces of any kind.
In addition, there are virtually no libraries, no unit testing, and no mature editor technologies to use alongside any flash tech.
So basically, if we're doing flash stuff, we're limited to programming methodologies that have been obsolete in other development areas for half a decade or more.
They'd have a solid niche if they 1) Didn't require EMCAScript as the basis for using flash. It's not powerful enough. 2) Made it *easy* to connect other languages to flash stuff on the server side (while it's possible now, it's not easy). 3) Made flash+javascript+html generators that can handle page resizes, loads, etc. and let these things work on any size screen by doing layout adjustments, and made it easy to add this behavior to the pages.
The benefits of using it would then far outweigh the complaints.
The reasons for not using it are technical, not based on legacy. Especially not compared to the still-pretty-new ASP.net code that people are writing now. I get new projects every three months or so, and can learn a new language in about a week during my free time. I would be using flash if it wasn't so limited.
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks
You mean add a few bucks. There's a price break for crapware. It pays for the cost of Windows and then some.
neutering the technology
No harddrive less memory, but better LCD, more efficient and flexible OS. Not to mention wireless meshing capability. It's specifically designed to interact with other devices of its kind and to display information - only allowing for simple mechanisms, crude mechanisms for data input.
Its exactly like a high-end PDA.
Is a PDA a neutered PC? Is a golf cart a neutered car? Is a housecat a neutered lion?
It's a different beast.
So while this computer is cool how will it's usefulness fare long term when people discover they can't do all the stuff people are doing with their normal computers in the developed world?
"S'ils n'ont plus de pain, qu'ils mangent de la brioche." Assuming that they could get PCs, about as well as PDAs fare in the developed world. Really, though, the point is that every single dollar counts.
Big thing: how many phone companies get to mess with your lines? In my area, there's three.
How many cable companies? In my area, there's one. My cable never goes down.
Where I work, the T1 line and phone lines go down about six times a month as one of the providers decides that they need to put in a new line (and since we're at the entrance to the complex, they decide they're going to splice into our line). Of course, they don't coordinate with any of the other providers - they don't care about customers that aren't theirs.
But wait - we have an SLA! Yay! The phone company pays us for our downtime. Of course, it doesn't even come close to the amount it costs when we lose internet during business hours, so it's not really any consolation. Might as well not have it.
It doesn't keep them from messing up the ground during working hours, either, so it's basically useless. Can't convince the boss to switch to cable, though.
No, they didn't. They really should have tested that. Personally, I like 7-zip's compressed filesystem better than WinZip's, but I haven't really tried any of the others.
Hold on...I've just been handed a note. Apparently you don't get to make any real choices in that area - it's zip or nothing. Further, the details of compressing and decompressing is handled whenever the filesystem feels like it, so it can't really be judged against traditional programs. So I guess that was a silly idea - more of a topic for people who work on reverse engineering the various Windows filesystems.
They also focused on compression rate when I believe they should have focused on decompression rate.
While IMHO this is more important for exactly the reason you said, it's also less interesting. Pretty much all of these algorithms are of the same class and will take about the same length of time to decompress as all of the rest. You don't get the same kind of dramatic results that way.
I always just assume that there are very, very few cases where more compression isn't always better if the only thing you're losing is the time it takes to compress. Trading compression for robustness isn't ever worth it, though.
If losing a portion of a file means that the entire archive is unrecoverable, I don't want it.
More specifically, if I installed a chrooted nxserver, and then made a series of launch profiles that I handed out that launched openoffice rather than running anything specific, wouldn't that be the same?
Or is this like that, but also tacking on something like UNO/CORBA/SOAP/DCOM?
This topic seems to be one such that it may be worth mentioning jooreports.
If your goal is to do version control on your content while keeping your layout separate this is probably ideal.
Aha! I have you there. Courses are not the whole of a subject.
This one's pretty simple, though. Proofs in the domain of complexity theory are often supplemented by programs. If the math is extremely difficult (which it usually is), and no one has yet figured out how to prove something, writing and running a program that does it will give them a clue.
How do you think people came up with the different sets of complexity problems? They saw patterns in the nature of the algorithms they used.
Further, writing actual problems gives key insight into them that solving proofs about them does not. Some problems are extremely difficult to solve optimally, but easy to get close-to-optimum solutions. As far as I know, there isn't a good way to express that without programming yet, but it's an interesting point to keep in mind when evaluating the fitness of an algorithm.
Which is really the point of complexity theory at all.
In our department (one of) the largest research groups are into type theory. Also hard computing science fields like, complexity theory, computability and (say quantum) algorithms require little or no programming.
Type theory was invented to describe programming languages and is a subcategory of language thoery. Can you see how programming might be a little involved things that affect programming languages? I would go so far as to say the math involved in type theory comes close to actually being code itself.
Complexity theory - empirical evidence that one idea that has been proven mathematically to be more clever than another is acquired by writing code. What if you didn't account for something that you should have?
Computability is extremely important for compilers - detecting code that won't work. Most of the well known aspects of this are essential to compiler design.
I am a Ph.D student in algorithms, and my (and most of my research groups) view is the exactly opposite. Perhaps so. Benchmarks have the same problem that proofs do: make it confusing enough, and you may be able to pull the wool over enough people's eyes to get your crap published. That doesn't mean that they're not valuable any more than that proofs aren't valuable. Obviously, some of the time, you need one more than the other. Some of the time you absolutely, positively need both.
I know for a fact that most of the work that I did in language theory didn't involve touching code at all. It was mostly proofs. But there was still some coding built-in. Code springs from every discipline of computer science, and if you're not using it you've specialized to the point of myopia. CS is not a form of pure mathematics.
In the end, it pretty much all the math in CS ends up describing something so you can put it in an algorithm...which then becomes code.
CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science were programming has *nothing* to do
Name one. I bet there's some programming involved in there.
When I was going through, the major CS areas I studied were Computer Vision, AI, Cognitive Science, Security, Compiler Theory, Language Theory, and OS Design.
There wasn't a single one of those that didn't involve writing code. You *can* do those things without writing code, but that's not as useful. You advance the field by showing that you've got a new approach that works better than previous approaches. You write a paper with theoretical and empirical evidence. You get your empirical evidence by running your code.
Sure, you need the theory as well. If you've got an algorithm that you think is always more clever than the currently accepted best - or that breaks something currently thought of as unbreakable, etc, you need to prove it mathematically. But a lot of people will think that you're probably pulling a fast one if you don't have actual data to back it up, so you probably should implement it.
Yeah...because I want to require people to run whichever version I compiled it with...I'm sure that's a good idea.
Totally how it works. You can (and should) write as much code as possible that'll work anywhere. Then load the assemblies that are specific if you have to.
but meh; Microsoft controls the only real.NET platform anyhow
This is what makes it so utterly astounding to me that a great many of the standard libraries that Microsoft pushed on everybody for.Net 1.1 are replaced with something else entirely in 2.0. They didn't even bother with a deprecation phase - just gone.
So not only will code compiled for.Net 2.0 not necessarily work on 1.1 - code written for 1.1 will not necessarily work for 2.0.
You have to manually check which version you're running and run different segments of code to do certain tasks.
That's why I think of.Net code as being a lot like Java code, except probably not portable between VMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Entire piece is also educational. So even if you argue that it isn't supposed to be satire (which it might not be), it's still specifically for the purpose of education.
Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this...speed trumps price just about every time.
I could be wrong, but are you implying that people will use this because it's got 160Mbit/sec write time? Keep in mind that this is 20MB/sec. That's a little low for the standard harddrive, and you can increase it by adding more drives in a sequential raid.
If that's the speed, then it absolutely isn't a good reason to use this.
The only advantage this actually has is information density. One 600GB disc is going to be pretty tiny compared to an array of harddrives designed to get the speed up.
Is that worth it for a library or bank? My inclination would be no. A couple hundred harddrives in a SAN is probably a better idea.
The market will be those individuals that absolutely, positively need the discs to be tiny, and nothing else matters. Because this tech isn't going to do anything else better than what we've already got.
How does other gene therapy work? Visuses. They add stuff to our genetic code and kill off a few cells to spread themselves around.
It'd be the same here.
he cannot be expected to be an expert in every subject
This is not about expertise. It's about basic literacy. This is an age where vast stores of knowledge are transferred over the internet, and an inability to use it is pretty close to an inability to read.
It means you can't get to the knowledge that most people can.
It means that you can't be as informed as those around you.
And if your job is to be generally knowledgeable about the world so that you can make wise decisions on any subject someone gives you with a bit of research, you're not in the right position.
If he was an expert in the law, but couldn't read, would that be okay? What about if he was an expert in the law but an idiot savant? Or an expert, but deaf, dumb, and blind? Or remembered everything about law, but otherwise couldn't remember anything longer than 10 minutes?
I refuse to believe that being a judge is all about knowing law. They need to have knowledge flowing into them like a river so that they can see the currents. Otherwise, they'll make myopic decisions.
...because it is true of Eastern Canada is the fallacy of composition.
"Sodium and Chloride are both dangerous to humans. Therefore any combination of sodium and chloride will be dangerous to humans."
That is also a fallacy of composition. I have found a counterexample to the fact that your claim is the fallacy of composition; clearly there are others, and therefore your statement is false.
So the GP must be right: we're not in the middle of an ice age.
P.S. I'm thinking of forming a new core of uptight jerks here at Slashdot. Grammar Nazis should be the only ones. The time of the Logic Fascists is at hand!
standardizing on hydrogen fuel cells and renewable energies ...which will be charged off of the power grid (which in the US means coal) at a much higher rate.
while turning Saskatewan into a farm belt with greenhouse gases
Did you mean Saskatchewan? At any rate, coal burning is worse. Getting off of coal is way more important than getting off the gasoline. Removing American dependence upon foreign oil would be nice for Americans (like me), though.
Told by a person they inherently TRUST.
What? Seriously? That ended for me somewhere around third grade...when I realized that my teacher had a grasp of mathematics only a few years beyond mine...which wasn't enough to answer my questions. Of course, what really destroyed it was learning that the simplifications of science we were being taught was such a simplification that the answers were actually wrong.
At what point does enough critical thinking kick in so that you don't trust what your teachers tell you anymore?
Did that not happen for you?
You could be right about the other stuff...but I don't know. 300 little deaths? Why not 20? Why not 600? They're evenly divided by the second, are they? Remember, the guy wasn't actually there. The fear of death was of the possibility of it, not eminent death.
From TFA:
night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park
Five minutes. Kids can't handle five minutes of fear in a weekend of great experiences? And we're not even talking about seeing something horrible. They were told there was a gunman, and that they didn't know where he was. This is something that brings events like the Virginia shootings into reality. It's not just something that they saw on TV. Now they know how it felt for five minutes. They can imagine how bad it would be for hours. Maybe they can even relate to kids who go to schools that are bad enough that they know that in going they are risking their lives.
A measure of empathy will do more good than harm, I think.
IMHO, the research dollars would be better spent on developing a process to grow "natural" blood.
IMHO, the research dollars would be better spend on developing a means where I can fly using the power of my mind. Because that's cool.
I know that it'll cost a lot more than the other thing, and maybe isn't possible, but I'd much rather have that. Those boring pragmatists striving after achievable goals need to start thinking about what I want.
Honestly i think that any research into the artificial growth of body parts, (like what has been done with mice and ears) is a step in the right direction.
Actually, what they need to do is watch X-Men. That will give them an idea of what I'm going for. We can start with being able to create flames from my mind and work up from there. While I'm not a biologist, and don't know anything about how these powers are going to be developed, it's probably a step in the right direction.
What are we waiting for? We need to get to work on this. Those mental flying powers aren't going to design themselves.
I don't have any direct experience either. I just took high school physics and paid attention. Of course, you may not buy that. If you've ever bought an epass, or some electronic mechanism for getting through tolls, you'll notice that they give you a bag that you can put the thing in if you don't want it to register...
without the, uh, thing.
Well, the thing is water and electricity proof, and fairly resistent to heat, light, and vibration.
You don't need to replace a cd every three years...unlike a harddrive. I'd be happy to get programs in other formats, or get media in other things, but I can't. CDs are the best things I can get. I'd really prefer to have a magical machine that would let me stamp my own HD-DVDs, but that's probably not going to happen, so I will continue to buy media in CD and DVD format stamped by other people.
If by "elegant" you mean "extremely easy to subvert," then yes.
Obviously, RFID tags use radio waves. It's in the name. So all you have to do is put the things in a faraday's cage, and no radio waves can get in or out.
In other words, wrap the CDs in foil or put them in foil bags and they won't go off. It's not even illegal to walk around a store with such a bag in your pocket, so how are they going to tell if you're going to use it to walk out with a CD in your pocket?
The only way we could really get around this is by using something that passes through everything that you could put them in.
AFAIK there is nothing like that. We can't use any kind of RF; faraday's cage gets around those easily.
We can't use sound; a huge number of materials absorb sound.
We can't use any kind of exotic particles that go through most materials because for the most part we can't emit or detect them.
How about just putting a gigantic bar on each CD that won't fit through the doors until they're removed?
Not terribly convenient for shoppers, but it'd work.
Of course, you could just have the actual CDs at the checkout counter and only get them handed to you after you paid, but I think that would actually cost more for brick-and-morter shops than the thefts do.
While the biology of neurons is not entirely understood we can at least say these things:
1) Cells die all over the brain all the time.
2) All cells are stateful - i.e., they all "remember" something.
3) Most of the cells are "rewriteable." It's possible that parts of all of them are.
Given this, I'm gonna have to go out on a limb and say that you actually do forget things. Occasionally, you have a cell die that can trigger other memories, but you also flat-out lose the memories (remember, you lose cells from all parts of your brain).
However, it's not as black-and-white as that because the brain stores memories in analog. Think of it kind of like a jpeg image - as you lose cells, a memory gets fuzzier the same way that a low-quality jpeg is fuzzier than a high quality one. (At least, this is how we think it works because this is how our models that do the same thing work).
So what happens when a low quality memory is brought to the surface? It's "rendered" imperfectly. So you get these "unlocked" memories that can't really be trusted because cells that made them up have died or been changed so much as to be the same.
It wouldn't be too good for the manufacturers,
You know what else really helps that? Having standard-sized screens. Up until recently, laptop LCDs were many different sizes.
While most of the smaller sizes come in various settings, the biggest - 17" and 15.4" are both pretty much one size. You don't get manufacturers making 16.7", etc.
And whenever something like that happens, parts start becoming standardized. And they are.
In two years there probably will be lots of places to buy generic replacement LCD screens for your 15.4" or 17" laptop screens.
That's like saying that if only we lived in sterile white rooms all our lives, we wouldn't need health insurance..
More like saying that all doctors should also be nutritionists, since what he's actually saying is that all the code-writers should be the security industry.
The initial statement seems to imply that he's saying that we should eliminate the industry. That's obviously a bit extreme, and I'm sure that there are going to be lots of people who will blow apart that strawman argument.
The more important point is that if most programmers programmed with security in mind, it'd be much easier. We wouldn't have programming languages designed like PHP, or OSes designed like Windows.
Sure we might get the occasional slip-up, but it wouldn't have the horrible design flaws that we're all paying hugely to fix now.
The big thing about most of it is that while no one's perfect, and flaws will come up, but with hardened designs, most won't be exploitable.
You mean, for example, remapping the unlink calls to libc to actually move things to ~/Trash?
.bashrc (or .zshrc, or whatever) file to be loaded using the preload trick?
.bashrc file can have it on, and everything else won't.
Surely you wouldn't want that on all accounts. Only for users. It'd be chaos if every single script on your computer that generated temp files had them moved rather than deleted.
How about putting it into the
That way, all users that have that
There is a library for this.
something I've always been missing on Linux
It works like a charm. I've been using it for years. It's available as a package in most distros, and has been for quite a long time.
I should also note that it can be implemented systemwide - so that *everything* is used that way. But that's a good way to kill your system. Your computer sometimes needs to delete things.
The problem is that Flash doesn't integrate in with anything ASP or .NET. ...or anything else, and it pretty much is based around fixed screen sizes, and that EMCAScript is a horrible language to do anything really heavy in because of a lack of an inbuilt inheritance structure, module loading, or really namespaces of any kind.
In addition, there are virtually no libraries, no unit testing, and no mature editor technologies to use alongside any flash tech.
So basically, if we're doing flash stuff, we're limited to programming methodologies that have been obsolete in other development areas for half a decade or more.
They'd have a solid niche if they
1) Didn't require EMCAScript as the basis for using flash. It's not powerful enough.
2) Made it *easy* to connect other languages to flash stuff on the server side (while it's possible now, it's not easy).
3) Made flash+javascript+html generators that can handle page resizes, loads, etc. and let these things work on any size screen by doing layout adjustments, and made it easy to add this behavior to the pages.
The benefits of using it would then far outweigh the complaints.
The reasons for not using it are technical, not based on legacy. Especially not compared to the still-pretty-new ASP.net code that people are writing now. I get new projects every three months or so, and can learn a new language in about a week during my free time. I would be using flash if it wasn't so limited.
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks
You mean add a few bucks. There's a price break for crapware. It pays for the cost of Windows and then some.
neutering the technology
No harddrive less memory, but better LCD, more efficient and flexible OS. Not to mention wireless meshing capability. It's specifically designed to interact with other devices of its kind and to display information - only allowing for simple mechanisms, crude mechanisms for data input.
Its exactly like a high-end PDA.
Is a PDA a neutered PC? Is a golf cart a neutered car? Is a housecat a neutered lion?
It's a different beast.
So while this computer is cool how will it's usefulness fare long term when people discover they can't do all the stuff people are doing with their normal computers in the developed world?
"S'ils n'ont plus de pain, qu'ils mangent de la brioche."
Assuming that they could get PCs, about as well as PDAs fare in the developed world. Really, though, the point is that every single dollar counts.
though your mileage will vary there
Big thing: how many phone companies get to mess with your lines? In my area, there's three.
How many cable companies? In my area, there's one. My cable never goes down.
Where I work, the T1 line and phone lines go down about six times a month as one of the providers decides that they need to put in a new line (and since we're at the entrance to the complex, they decide they're going to splice into our line). Of course, they don't coordinate with any of the other providers - they don't care about customers that aren't theirs.
But wait - we have an SLA! Yay! The phone company pays us for our downtime. Of course, it doesn't even come close to the amount it costs when we lose internet during business hours, so it's not really any consolation. Might as well not have it.
It doesn't keep them from messing up the ground during working hours, either, so it's basically useless. Can't convince the boss to switch to cable, though.
They didn't test filesystem compression.
No, they didn't. They really should have tested that. Personally, I like 7-zip's compressed filesystem better than WinZip's, but I haven't really tried any of the others.
Hold on...I've just been handed a note. Apparently you don't get to make any real choices in that area - it's zip or nothing. Further, the details of compressing and decompressing is handled whenever the filesystem feels like it, so it can't really be judged against traditional programs. So I guess that was a silly idea - more of a topic for people who work on reverse engineering the various Windows filesystems.
They also focused on compression rate when I believe they should have focused on decompression rate.
While IMHO this is more important for exactly the reason you said, it's also less interesting. Pretty much all of these algorithms are of the same class and will take about the same length of time to decompress as all of the rest. You don't get the same kind of dramatic results that way.
I always just assume that there are very, very few cases where more compression isn't always better if the only thing you're losing is the time it takes to compress. Trading compression for robustness isn't ever worth it, though.
If losing a portion of a file means that the entire archive is unrecoverable, I don't want it.
So...uh...how is this not exactly like X?
More specifically, if I installed a chrooted nxserver, and then made a series of launch profiles that I handed out that launched openoffice rather than running anything specific, wouldn't that be the same?
Or is this like that, but also tacking on something like UNO/CORBA/SOAP/DCOM?
This topic seems to be one such that it may be worth mentioning jooreports.
If your goal is to do version control on your content while keeping your layout separate this is probably ideal.
whole course
Aha! I have you there. Courses are not the whole of a subject.
This one's pretty simple, though. Proofs in the domain of complexity theory are often supplemented by programs. If the math is extremely difficult (which it usually is), and no one has yet figured out how to prove something, writing and running a program that does it will give them a clue.
How do you think people came up with the different sets of complexity problems? They saw patterns in the nature of the algorithms they used.
Further, writing actual problems gives key insight into them that solving proofs about them does not. Some problems are extremely difficult to solve optimally, but easy to get close-to-optimum solutions. As far as I know, there isn't a good way to express that without programming yet, but it's an interesting point to keep in mind when evaluating the fitness of an algorithm.
Which is really the point of complexity theory at all.
In our department (one of) the largest research groups are into type theory. Also hard computing science fields like, complexity theory, computability and (say quantum) algorithms require little or no programming.
Type theory was invented to describe programming languages and is a subcategory of language thoery. Can you see how programming might be a little involved things that affect programming languages? I would go so far as to say the math involved in type theory comes close to actually being code itself.
Complexity theory - empirical evidence that one idea that has been proven mathematically to be more clever than another is acquired by writing code. What if you didn't account for something that you should have?
Computability is extremely important for compilers - detecting code that won't work. Most of the well known aspects of this are essential to compiler design.
I am a Ph.D student in algorithms, and my (and most of my research groups) view is the exactly opposite.
Perhaps so. Benchmarks have the same problem that proofs do: make it confusing enough, and you may be able to pull the wool over enough people's eyes to get your crap published. That doesn't mean that they're not valuable any more than that proofs aren't valuable. Obviously, some of the time, you need one more than the other. Some of the time you absolutely, positively need both.
I know for a fact that most of the work that I did in language theory didn't involve touching code at all. It was mostly proofs. But there was still some coding built-in. Code springs from every discipline of computer science, and if you're not using it you've specialized to the point of myopia. CS is not a form of pure mathematics.
In the end, it pretty much all the math in CS ends up describing something so you can put it in an algorithm...which then becomes code.
CS is NOT all about programming, there are countless branches of Computer Science were programming has *nothing* to do
Name one. I bet there's some programming involved in there.
When I was going through, the major CS areas I studied were Computer Vision, AI, Cognitive Science, Security, Compiler Theory, Language Theory, and OS Design.
There wasn't a single one of those that didn't involve writing code. You *can* do those things without writing code, but that's not as useful. You advance the field by showing that you've got a new approach that works better than previous approaches. You write a paper with theoretical and empirical evidence. You get your empirical evidence by running your code.
Sure, you need the theory as well. If you've got an algorithm that you think is always more clever than the currently accepted best - or that breaks something currently thought of as unbreakable, etc, you need to prove it mathematically. But a lot of people will think that you're probably pulling a fast one if you don't have actual data to back it up, so you probably should implement it.
Yeah...because I want to require people to run whichever version I compiled it with...I'm sure that's a good idea.
Totally how it works. You can (and should) write as much code as possible that'll work anywhere.
Then load the assemblies that are specific if you have to.
but meh; Microsoft controls the only real .NET platform anyhow
.Net 1.1 are replaced with something else entirely in 2.0.
.Net 2.0 not necessarily work on 1.1 - code written for 1.1 will not necessarily work for 2.0.
.Net code as being a lot like Java code, except probably not portable between VMs.
This is what makes it so utterly astounding to me that a great many of the standard libraries that Microsoft pushed on everybody for
They didn't even bother with a deprecation phase - just gone.
So not only will code compiled for
You have to manually check which version you're running and run different segments of code to do certain tasks.
That's why I think of