I'd rather live through an ice age with fire and warm clothing than a hot age with nothing but air conditioning and fans.
No you wouldn't. Glaciers are very inhospitable indeed, and leave a terrible mess afterwards too. Instead, you'd really rather live through a "comfortably-temperate age", rather like how things were for most of human history.
It's not quite as bad as that; you can actually win with enough effort. Devising a properly thorough suite of test cases is equivalently hard to demonstrating that the program is formally correct, but not harder. OK, this is because a thorough suite of test cases (that all pass, natch!) is really exactly a proof of correctness; you need all the same mental tools and thought processes. It's very difficult, but not impossible.
But most programmers punt on all that, and use the "hope and pray" approach to verification. For lots of code (especially temporary stuff like small shell scripts) that works well enough.
And that's how a tiny little company with a crap product came to inherit one of the largest and best organized sales channels in the world, and bootstrapped itself into one of the largest companies of all time.
Except that, by corporate standards, Microsoft aren't all that large. There are many companies much larger. There are even many IT industry companies that are larger. What Microsoft are is a very large (largest?) software company.
Plus, a message discussing a B12 bomber would be likely to have other high-ham words, especially in the context of an ongoing discussion on the topic. Bayesian filters (or at least the ones that are any good) pick up on this sort of thing too, and it is part and parcel of what makes real content filtering so effective. But effective content filtering has to be done on actual mailboxes; it depends on the fact that individual people don't discuss that many different topics on a normal basis...
Google, while great for english speakers, is quite a ways behind for other languages.
One key difficulty for many languages is getting a good stemming algorithm so as to be able to break a sentence down into a group of meanings (thus all the words "jumping", "jumps" and "jumped" all go down to the same basic meaning, "jump", making it far easier to build useful indices). This is an area that has had a lot of work done in English, but I'm told (by someone who knows a lot more about this than I do) that the algorithms used there don't work too well with other languages. Governmental investment in developing such algorithms is perfectly reasonable, and should benefit all search engines eventually.
Another big problem is that many webpages don't declare what language they're in. Please remember to add those lang attributes!
They got rid of the pond a few years ago, because they thought it was leaking water in even when there wasn't a fire. It's a roof-garden now. (And it turned out that the leak wasn't from the pond anyway; it was a badly sealed flat roof.)
CDE predates win95, and was based on the many desktop WIMP environments around in the late 1980s, such as HPs VUE.
A lot of the things you imagine are Windows interface paradigms are actually basic HCI stuff (Fitts law, Roman language left-right convention, and whatnot) that pretty much dictate colour schemes, icon size, icon behaviour, left to right conventions, etc.
Actually, both CDE and Windows derive from the CUA work by IBM from waaaay back. There have been other GUI paradigms about (Macs are the most well-known example, but there were others, including the Athena widgets from ancient X11 (not that you ever want to use them) and RiscOS) which worked in different ways.
How is any spec that includes by reference the behavior of proprietary software exactly "open"?
Easy. It's open... to abuse.
Re:Smoking bans: reducing freedom, or increasing i
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2006's Bill of Wrongs
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· Score: 1
You've yet to establish why a tobacco consumer should have the right to cause non-consumers to have to deal with the waste products of the consumption (i.e. the passive smoking problem). Since there are other ways of consuming tobacco that do not inflict a disgusting health hazard on other people (e.g. chewing tobacco, gum, snuff, patches) smoking has a real problem in that it is strongly inclined to tread roughshod over other peoples' rights. It is because these other alternatives exist that I support banning smoking in (wide-sense, not just governmental) public places; it's a small reduction in some peoples' rights to gain a set of rights for others.
No serious scientist would use a closed source compiler.
Not true actually. Most serious scientists (especially outside physics and closely-related fields like astronomy) don't write or build code if they can help it; they hire someone to do it for them.
basic things like calendaring, public folders, centralized rules administration
I know what calendaring does (and note that there are free alternatives to Outlook under development) but what are "public folders" and "centralized rules administration"? Are public folders like an NNTP server, possibly with server-local or domain-local groups, which Thunderbird handles excellently? (Googling for "centralized rules administration" doesn't seem to lead to much enlightenment; too many other probably-unrelated schemes for centralizing the administration of rules in specific domains...) Without knowing exactly what features (at the technical level) are missing, it's hard to argue against what you say.
The fact of the matter is that you cant even access an exchange server with T-Bird.
That's one I know about, and it's because of the nasty mess that is Exchange, and especially its protocols for talking to Outlook. I could say more on what I think about this particular area, but it's the season of Goodwill To Men, so I think I prefer to stay mellow...
Personally I'd miss the formatting features of HTML. Bold, Italic, etc. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a middle ground estbalished at some point.
You should be aware that there has been such a format for quite a while, using the MIME type of text/enriched. I used to receive quite a few emails that used it (no, I don't remember what the originating client was and I'm not interested in looking it up right now) but it never seemed to catch on more widely. (At a wild guess, that's because Outlook didn't generate it; yet another opportunity missed by those geniuses at Microsoft...)
until quantum physics is either discredited or modified, there's a definite place for "free will" in science.
Actually, there's a good place for free will in practice while the human brain acts like a non-linear system with a minimum of trillions of hidden variables. Let us also remember that there is room for fluid dynamics in all this too (brain cells being in and containing fluid mediums) and FD is known to be fundamentally complicated even without thinking about QM. Perhaps quantum mechanics shoves its oar into the affair, but the dominant factors in the non-predictability of human beings are more prosaic.
A few reloads later... X-Fry: I haven't had time off since I was twenty-one through twenty-four. X-Bender: They're tormenting me with uptempo singing and dancing! X-Leela: Do you have idiots on your planet?
Why does so much of normal proceedure in Microsoft require a reeboot?
Because Windows insists on locking down any file that is being executed (be it program or dynamically-loadable library). Moreover, because their filesystems lack any concept like a Unix inode, there's no way to install a new version of a file while those locks are held. The MS fix is a way to arrange for the installation of a new file on the next boot-up, which in turn means that you get a forced reboot anytime some piece of code wants to update a piece of software that happens to be being executed at the time. (There's probably a similar problem with drivers, except you don't get updates to those quite so often it seems.)
Compile once run anywhere is just the sort of language people in the Grid computing world like to hear. But I guess Grid computing bods aren't worried about performance...
We're not worried about performance of the front-end machine that's running Java. We're worried about the performance of the back-end cluster that's running the real MPI/FORTRAN codes. We're worried about the performance of the networks that connect all our bits and pieces up. We're worried about the performance of the databases that we're shipping terabytes to and from. But the front-end stuff needs robustness and lots of library support, which Java's pretty good for. (Some people use C# instead, which has approximately the same trade-offs in this space.)
When your employer can fire you in a moment and find someone else just as fast to fill your job, then yes, you'd better give your life to them or else you won't have much of a life to live.
Bullshit. They're your employer, not your owner. Slavery is illegal, damn it! If your boss insists that you may not have a family life, tell him (or her) where to shove it and walk out. You don't need to work for such assholes, and nor is any amount of cash worth such terrible conditions.
Welcome to 7 billion people.
Remember, with all those people out there there's got to be lots of other places to get a job too.
It always fascinates me that we have no problem making customers use a new specialized tool like a browser, but it's taboo to use a non-ASCII tool for development. So we continue to structure our data as if it were going to be processed by a VT100.
Having tried to do real programming with a graphical programming language (no, not just GUI layout!) and having tried to actually write said graphical programming language, I have come to the conclusion that graphical programming is really really hard. Any time you have a really tricky problem to do, there is nothing better than a textual language for doing it (there are some things you can do with mixed models, but they never quite manage to go to being fully graphical).
There is no reason to stick to ASCII though (full UNICODE works fine in practice) and the use of variable-width fonts can work too, or it would if people didn't assume fixed-width fonts in a massive amount of existing code. It's probably a bad idea to convey real information in the font though; approaches more like the auto-colorizing of most programmers' editors works better.
Slashdot Mirror
SQL and text searching? Check out the FTS1 module for SQLite...
It's not quite as bad as that; you can actually win with enough effort. Devising a properly thorough suite of test cases is equivalently hard to demonstrating that the program is formally correct, but not harder. OK, this is because a thorough suite of test cases (that all pass, natch!) is really exactly a proof of correctness; you need all the same mental tools and thought processes. It's very difficult, but not impossible.
But most programmers punt on all that, and use the "hope and pray" approach to verification. For lots of code (especially temporary stuff like small shell scripts) that works well enough.
Plus, a message discussing a B12 bomber would be likely to have other high-ham words, especially in the context of an ongoing discussion on the topic. Bayesian filters (or at least the ones that are any good) pick up on this sort of thing too, and it is part and parcel of what makes real content filtering so effective. But effective content filtering has to be done on actual mailboxes; it depends on the fact that individual people don't discuss that many different topics on a normal basis...
Another big problem is that many webpages don't declare what language they're in. Please remember to add those lang attributes!
They got rid of the pond a few years ago, because they thought it was leaking water in even when there wasn't a fire. It's a roof-garden now. (And it turned out that the leak wasn't from the pond anyway; it was a badly sealed flat roof.)
You've yet to establish why a tobacco consumer should have the right to cause non-consumers to have to deal with the waste products of the consumption (i.e. the passive smoking problem). Since there are other ways of consuming tobacco that do not inflict a disgusting health hazard on other people (e.g. chewing tobacco, gum, snuff, patches) smoking has a real problem in that it is strongly inclined to tread roughshod over other peoples' rights. It is because these other alternatives exist that I support banning smoking in (wide-sense, not just governmental) public places; it's a small reduction in some peoples' rights to gain a set of rights for others.
He doesn't sleep at night. FYI, vampires retreat to their crypts for daylight hours...
That's one I know about, and it's because of the nasty mess that is Exchange, and especially its protocols for talking to Outlook. I could say more on what I think about this particular area, but it's the season of Goodwill To Men, so I think I prefer to stay mellow...
It would be easier to just assign a high spamminess score (or maybe a spamminess multiplier?) to anything that includes an attached image.
A few reloads later...
X-Fry: I haven't had time off since I was twenty-one through twenty-four.
X-Bender: They're tormenting me with uptempo singing and dancing!
X-Leela: Do you have idiots on your planet?
Yes that's purely electromagnetism in action (except for the gravitational field holding the interacting parties down, of course).
There is no reason to stick to ASCII though (full UNICODE works fine in practice) and the use of variable-width fonts can work too, or it would if people didn't assume fixed-width fonts in a massive amount of existing code. It's probably a bad idea to convey real information in the font though; approaches more like the auto-colorizing of most programmers' editors works better.