Never mind my previous response, I looked at some of your other comments and see you're just a troll (e.g. a selection from your other comments: "You missed the point, genius. Your rant is off topic and excessively rant-y. Nobody here wants to debate with you because you're bat-shit crazy. You should seek professional help or at least a hobby where you don't interact with strangers.")
Huh?? How does "simplify the tax code" automatically imply "double your tax burden"? And how is it off-topic to talk about complex tax rules in a topic that is specifically about people getting caught up in overly-complex tax rules that nobody understands and everyone is misinterpreting? Third, why is it 'dreaming' to simplify an over 8000 page tax code, and by far the most complex tax code in the entire world - WTF? No offense but is there something wrong with you? I've never seen such a bizarre, non-sequitir response to anything in my life.
Yeah, I've wondered about this, I'm not completely convinced, but then again haven't studied the 'real research'... if that's the case, then it may be that the feminist movement in the West has been the largest contributor to declining fertility rates. Likely it's a combination of the various factors (education / contraception availability / cultural), with some factors contributing more. Of course the downside to all this is that uneducated people are experiencing a population explosion - and of course, with lots of kids, it's even harder to educate them - while populations of educated people are in some places even in decline. Whether or not this is a "problem" depends on a number of things; if education is the answer, then it's only truly a "problem" if education levels do not "catch up" with population growth fast enough. Technology allows us (so far) to 'feed more people with less', so masses can survive, but if the ratio of uneducated to educated becomes too large, social problems may create downward spirals that undermine and destabilise the entire system. The worst case scenario is the collapse of industrialised economies and large-scale reversion of the entire world to third-world conditions (with a steep decline in population following that soon thereafter as e.g. dams break down and drinking water becomes polluted etc.). So-called "overpopulation" is not a problem though if most of those people are productive, hard-working and by and large obey the rule of law - technology will solve the resource problems while education could rein in exponential population growth. It's difficult to predict exactly which way it'll go, but I fall slightly on the side of pessimism these days - I don't see modernisation and its requisite work ethic growing fast enough amongst the uneducated, instead I see an increase in destructive ethics like entitlement and socialism (i.e. growing masses of lazy poor 'demanding' or stealing from the wealthier and unwilling to work).
The more crowded the world gets, the more expensive it will be to have many children, and the fewer people will have
If that were the case, then wealthier people would be having more children and poorer people would be having fewer. In fact it is the EXACT opposite; the people who can afford the least children, have the most, and vice versa. There are many reasons/factors that come into play, e.g. cultural (it's become "socially unacceptable", for example, amongst the "educated class" to have lots of children - you are considered low class now if you have lots of kids, this was not true even just a few generations ago in our own culture, e.g. my gran was one of over a dozen kids and that was 'normal' then; conversely in many African cultures here, for example, having many children IS regarded as 'wealth'). Another factor I believe is a kind of instinct present in many animals too whereby when times are tough and infant survival rates thus lower, more offspring are produced to increase chances of survival.
The biggest drop in fertility rates amongst the world's wealthy educated minority did not actually coincide with education though, it coincided with the development and widespread availability of 'The Pill' in the late 60s / early 70s. Most of the world's poor either can't afford good contraception or aren't terribly interested in it.
For various reasons the poor are still able to survive in big numbers - their basic needs, like food, are mostly taken care of. In some cases this is thanks to welfare and AID, in others thanks to industrial agriculture allowing the earth to produce a lot of food at low cost. Also things like basic medicines/vaccines are comparatively widely available now globally. So average infant survival rates are MUCH higher than they were even fifty years ago. People just aren't dying much, even in poor countries, so producing children IS very cheap UNLESS you actually want to house and educate them properly, but most do not do this.
My guess, because it's not about the *iPhone*, it's about the entire cellphone market: Sun want Java to become the standard language/platform for cellphone app development, and Java ME is already commonly used and has an application base - it's most useful to have all those apps be easily portable to the iPhone, and vice versa for new iPhone apps.
If iPhone app developers code for the full version, their apps won't run on Java ME devices and will be even harder to port to (non-ME) Android, which is the other important 'prong' in their strategy --- with Android on the way, Java looks set to become "the" future platform for mobile devices, and then quite possibly later to basically all computers due to eventual convergence of cellphones/laptops - after nearly dying, Java may be truly getting a 'second chance at life' here, but only if Sun can make it a kind of de facto standard platform.
Or when people laughed at the notion of an email message that could automatically invoke executable code and install a virus just by being read (a la "good times" hoax:( ).
My mistake was thinking that this story might be amusing to some. Obviously, the need to criticize here is more important than the need to laugh
Don't let it bother you, shani is obviously just an idiot who, it would seem, doesn't actually have any non-academic experience coding C or C++. It was amusing to me simply because of the recognition of my own experiences:). As someone with (currently) about six years C++ experience and about ten years programming experience, I've got plenty of similar stories myself:) Writing out of array bounds onto other class members isn't always as obvious as it was in your case either, sometimes the index is derived in a complicated manner, and you obviously can't bounds-check every single time. Sometimes its just a cut-n-paste problem, e.g. duplicating the for-loop initialization for one array for another array of a different size, forgetting to change it in the for-loop etc. C++ has lots of potential pitfalls and room for these easy mistakes to make. Derived classes redefining a member already defined in a parent class, forgetting to initialize a member, modifying the parameters of a virtual function in the base class and forgetting to change overridden versions of the function in derived classes, so the derived versions don't get called, typecasting incorrectly etc etc. Some of these have produced some pretty hilarious results, like some really bizarre missile flight paths in our simulations, but you probably sorta had to be there:).
the use of 6 is pretty inexcusable. Even K&R had #define!!
Uh, WTF would that have helped? The bug would have been the same:
#define MOVELISTSIZE 6
struct player
{
coord movelist[MOVELISTSIZE];
};
player->movelist[MOVELISTSIZE].x = foo;
Its a 'simple' sort of mistake to make, most C/C++ coders with any reasonable amount of experience are likely to have similar stories to tell (myself included).
And WTF has "using abstraction" got to do with it? Could you explain how "using abstraction" could have avoided a little mistake like that? Lets see:
class Player
{
public:
void SetMovelistValue(int nIndex, float x, float y);
Oops! Bug still there! I guess "using abstraction" had nothing to do with it then. What are you trying to say?
As the other poster said, all you're doing is "flexing your geek", and its pretty lame. Does it make you feel better about yourself to assert that you are some sort of Perl God who allegedly could code rings around the C/C++ programmers? Get over yourself. Perl does a lot of dirty work for you.
I bought a bed recently and stated clearly "phone before delivery". They phoned at 10:00 a.m. I sat and waited over six hours (phoning them inbetween to complain and ask what was going on, they just told me the driver was "on the way"). The driver eventually showed up at about 16:30.
Anyway, when I went back to the store a week later (to have the bed swopped for a different one) the lady happened to tell me that they had just fired their driving subcontractor:) Hehe, brilliant. She said "I can't have my customers wait six hours".
I find it interesting that there not only seems to be a lot of UPS horror stories on this thread, but also that there seems to be a distinct lack of either Fedex or USPS horror stories. Quite telling. Conspicuous by its absence.
However, looking at the pictures, I dont think that the computers were packed properly
Maybe so, but looking at the severe amounts of damage these computers took (it is really *difficult* to inflict so much damage), I cannot see how it could have been anything other than outright vandalism. It just doesn't seem possible to me AT ALL that all that damage was the incidental result of the way packages are moved/handled. Actually, it looks more like someone took a baseball bat or a sledge-hammer and spent a good five or ten minutes bashing these computers, deliberately and malicously.
You tell us you're posting "in defense" of UPS, and then you tell us:
I have seen a Dell monitor box fall three stories without suffering so much as a dented edge. I have seen my coworkers jumping up and down on a Gateway box with the deliberate intention of destroying it?
WTF? Was that supposed to make us feel better about UPS?:)
In spite of the fact that I already think that people are incredibly stupid, and in spite of seeing decades of evidence of the incredible stupidity of people on probably at least a weekly basis, stories like this (these eBay auctions) still somehow manage to boggle my mind and make me shake my head in wonder and disbelief. I find myself searching for possible rational explanations. So far the only explanation I can come up with that makes sense to me is that perhaps the bidders on these auctions were mostly foreigners with very poor English skills (possibly having recently moved e.g. to the US), who would not only easily have misunderstood the descriptions (understanding probably mostly just the main keywords), but would themselves (in a sort of naive trusting of people, and in good faith) never have believed or even considered that anyone would attempt such ridiculous auctions. If that was the case, I wonder if there would be any legal implications. Probably not, but still, if somebody deliberately and knowingly conned a naive immigrant with poor English skills, it seems a bit on the shady side.
It's nice to see that a new buzzword has emerged to allow people to gloss-over topics they don't get
Perhaps it only seems that way to you because its a topic you don't understand. The term "genetic algorithm" is FAR from new, genetic algorithm research has been going on for decades (with some machine-learning-related texts dealing with "evolutionary programming" dating back to the 1960s), and the term describes a very specific (and actually somewhat mundane) AI technique. Its not a "general term" being used to describe something that they aren't willing to describe in the article, in fact, its pretty much a certainty that they chose that word precisely because it refers to the *exact technique* being used, and there is no ambiguity in using it if you know what genetic algorithms are. Hardly a buzzword.
Re:I'd have a hard time taking this book seriously
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2
legLess just wanted to prove to us all how much better and more cultured and "super-intellectual" he is than everyone else here; Dilbert is "beneath his level", so since the majority of people here enjoy Dilbert, this is how he declares his alleged "superiority" over the "common masses". Its boring, plain-old classism at its lamest. Reminds me of someone I knew who only listened to classical music, and considered anyone who could not also "appreciate" classical music to be beneath him. Personally, I doubt that legLess has read much of anything from Scott Adams, because he makes an extremely shallow analysis of the Dilbert comic strip. Scott Adams works contain many insightful philophical subtleties that many people seem to miss, and his humour books even more so.
I guess part of the problem here is the popular view that comics are not art, but are essentially worthless, except perhaps good for for a laugh but thats it. So people generally have the opinion that poetry is "high art" while comics are "low art", which is obviously untrue to anyone who has ever actually read any of the comics that don't fall into the 90% of sturgeons law (e.g. Pogo, Maus, Barefoot Gen etc). This is a subject that Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) also occasionally addressed in his comic strips.
If anyone doesn't think that the comics medium is capable of brilliant, subtle satire, I suggest they go read Walt Kelly's Pogo right now.
I'm not sure why legLess thinks that wanting to be rich makes somebody less worthy a satirist. Thats a ridiculous assertion.
Scott Adams also manages to bring some of the philosophical issues he deals with in his books "to the masses" (at least probably to the extent that that is possible). I guess some pseudo-intellectual classists resent that, because when philosophy starts to reach the masses, they no longer have something to use to proclaim their superiority over the masses.
Re:I'd have a hard time taking this book seriously
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2
Virtually every single one of Scott Adams books (that aren't 100% comic strips) contain plenty of insightful, interesting and thoughtful philosophical comments. Its difficult to miss, so I can't understand how you could have read any of his works without noticing it. Similarly, I found mblumber's "Adams is not known for writing super-intelligent commentaries on life" comments quite strange. Even his comic strips deal with philosophical and religous issues (such as the one where Dogbert postulates that God, the 'ultimate higher-level being', must be our future, not our past, because progressively higher-level systems in life are continually being developed from simpler, "building-block" organisms, and that we are just one step along the way). There are plenty of examples though. It boggles my mind that anyone can have read any of his books without noticing the obvious non-mainstream philosophical slant. If you've been reading Dilbert (and more generally anything of Scott Adams) as purely light humour, you've been missing out.
Yip, I really like C++ (i.e. I enjoy programming with it), but there's no question it isn't the best solution for everything. We use it at work for most our stuff because we need the speed (3d simulators), but for many types of projects its definitely not the best solution, with not only longer development and more LOC but also more bugs than other solutions (a good percentage being pointer-related bugs, e.g. dangling pointers, also things like uninitialized variables etc, and in general you spend more time with memory management). If you don't need speed, rather use things like Python/Tcl/VB/Delphi etc. Simpler, more maintainable, lower ADT (Application Development Time) etc.
There also seems to be a professionalism problem in software development - programmers often deviate from the project spec to add things that they want to add, just because its fun for them, with no regard to the impact on the deadline or whether or not the feature is required and/or even useful for the project. Project deadlines for bridges would also often slip if some of the engineers kept deciding halfway through that it "would be cool" if the bridge pillars "looked like giant penguins" or something. "Real" engineers have the professionalism to realise that they need to stick to the spec. With software its not quite so clear that you absolutely have to, so (unprofessional) software developers spend too much time near the beginning of the project adding fun, cool, useless things instead of concentrating on what needs to be done. Then for the last two weeks before the deadline SOMEBODY ELSE (usually me) usually ends up picking up the slack and working 16-hour shifts to get the program ready for delivery.
I keep having fights with one of the developers here, who is a good programmer, but he has *no* concept of deadlines, time, or priorities. Even the *management* have started multiplying his development time estimates by a factor of three (its usually the other way round!). He's always like "I'd like to add this", or "it would be really cool if we had this feature", or "but we're going to need this eventually anyway" (for future future projects that don't exist yet). And its always "it'll take less than a day", or "it'll only take a day or two". And it ALWAYS takes several times longer than "a day or two". And these things add up, he just doesn't see it, a few days here and there soon add up to a month or two. I can't get it into his head that even if it "only takes a day", as he insists, that thats one day that we don't have to spare, we're already running late as it is. Its simply not possible to add features without pushing your deadline further back, and he just doesn't get that. Its unprofessional, and its frustrating.
My biggest problem as project manager just seems to be getting people to work on what they're supposed to be doing. It doesn't help either that my manager keeps finding other things for the programmers to do. Some of the developers are professional, and will just focus on doing their jobs without requiring nanny assistance, but some of them you seem to need to check up on several times a day to make sure they're not doing the things they *want* to be doing. I shouldn't have to do that.
Yip. This settlement is about the best possible outcome to the case that Microsoft could ever have hoped for. Even Bill Gates was gushing on TV about how happy he was about it, which should immediately tell you just how ineffective this settlement is going to be. Microsoft won this case, big-time. At the OEMs I work with, the Microsoft tax is *still* implemented 100%, no new PCs may be sold without a legit copy of Windows. The only difference seems to be that instead of preferential pricing for OEMs, Microsoft now charges *all* OEMs the *HIGHEST* possible price for Windows (not the average of what they were making on Windows, so they're making much more now), and they still get to 'blame it on the justice department'. MS is still making exclusivity deals wherever it can (e.g. XBox + games). I suspect this three-person regulatory body (one of the three being appointed by Microsoft to boot) is going to be the most ineffective in the history of antitrust rulings/settlements.
Eventually, they'll get around to releasing a decent product
but that part didn't make sense to me, after all, this is MS we're talking about.
I can remember since the days of Windows 3 (about eight or nine years ago) that people have been hoping for Microsoft to eventually "release a decent product". We're still waiting for it. With every new release, people seem to forgive MS immediately and brush it off with "oh well, maybe the next version will be good, we'll endure the suffering in the meantime". (Perhaps XP is "it", but then is it really acceptable to wait close to *ten years*, and pay several times over during the wait, to get a half-decent product which is anyway several years behind what OSs should be by now, technologically? I can't think of a feature in any Microsoft Windows version that hadn't already been around for several years in some other system, and that includes XP)
Slashdot Mirror
They should lose in this case because they've overstepped their bounds.
That's why it's time for revolution, I'm afraid. Which would make us actually be what they're afraid of, but it's the only appropriate recourse left.
"Guideline"? Near as I can tell, it's already been downgraded to "toilet paper".
Never mind my previous response, I looked at some of your other comments and see you're just a troll (e.g. a selection from your other comments: "You missed the point, genius. Your rant is off topic and excessively rant-y. Nobody here wants to debate with you because you're bat-shit crazy. You should seek professional help or at least a hobby where you don't interact with strangers.")
Huh?? How does "simplify the tax code" automatically imply "double your tax burden"? And how is it off-topic to talk about complex tax rules in a topic that is specifically about people getting caught up in overly-complex tax rules that nobody understands and everyone is misinterpreting? Third, why is it 'dreaming' to simplify an over 8000 page tax code, and by far the most complex tax code in the entire world - WTF? No offense but is there something wrong with you? I've never seen such a bizarre, non-sequitir response to anything in my life.
Yeah, I've wondered about this, I'm not completely convinced, but then again haven't studied the 'real research' ... if that's the case, then it may be that the feminist movement in the West has been the largest contributor to declining fertility rates. Likely it's a combination of the various factors (education / contraception availability / cultural), with some factors contributing more. Of course the downside to all this is that uneducated people are experiencing a population explosion - and of course, with lots of kids, it's even harder to educate them - while populations of educated people are in some places even in decline. Whether or not this is a "problem" depends on a number of things; if education is the answer, then it's only truly a "problem" if education levels do not "catch up" with population growth fast enough. Technology allows us (so far) to 'feed more people with less', so masses can survive, but if the ratio of uneducated to educated becomes too large, social problems may create downward spirals that undermine and destabilise the entire system. The worst case scenario is the collapse of industrialised economies and large-scale reversion of the entire world to third-world conditions (with a steep decline in population following that soon thereafter as e.g. dams break down and drinking water becomes polluted etc.). So-called "overpopulation" is not a problem though if most of those people are productive, hard-working and by and large obey the rule of law - technology will solve the resource problems while education could rein in exponential population growth. It's difficult to predict exactly which way it'll go, but I fall slightly on the side of pessimism these days - I don't see modernisation and its requisite work ethic growing fast enough amongst the uneducated, instead I see an increase in destructive ethics like entitlement and socialism (i.e. growing masses of lazy poor 'demanding' or stealing from the wealthier and unwilling to work).
If that were the case, then wealthier people would be having more children and poorer people would be having fewer. In fact it is the EXACT opposite; the people who can afford the least children, have the most, and vice versa. There are many reasons/factors that come into play, e.g. cultural (it's become "socially unacceptable", for example, amongst the "educated class" to have lots of children - you are considered low class now if you have lots of kids, this was not true even just a few generations ago in our own culture, e.g. my gran was one of over a dozen kids and that was 'normal' then; conversely in many African cultures here, for example, having many children IS regarded as 'wealth'). Another factor I believe is a kind of instinct present in many animals too whereby when times are tough and infant survival rates thus lower, more offspring are produced to increase chances of survival.
The biggest drop in fertility rates amongst the world's wealthy educated minority did not actually coincide with education though, it coincided with the development and widespread availability of 'The Pill' in the late 60s / early 70s. Most of the world's poor either can't afford good contraception or aren't terribly interested in it.
For various reasons the poor are still able to survive in big numbers - their basic needs, like food, are mostly taken care of. In some cases this is thanks to welfare and AID, in others thanks to industrial agriculture allowing the earth to produce a lot of food at low cost. Also things like basic medicines/vaccines are comparatively widely available now globally. So average infant survival rates are MUCH higher than they were even fifty years ago. People just aren't dying much, even in poor countries, so producing children IS very cheap UNLESS you actually want to house and educate them properly, but most do not do this.
My guess, because it's not about the *iPhone*, it's about the entire cellphone market: Sun want Java to become the standard language/platform for cellphone app development, and Java ME is already commonly used and has an application base - it's most useful to have all those apps be easily portable to the iPhone, and vice versa for new iPhone apps.
If iPhone app developers code for the full version, their apps won't run on Java ME devices and will be even harder to port to (non-ME) Android, which is the other important 'prong' in their strategy --- with Android on the way, Java looks set to become "the" future platform for mobile devices, and then quite possibly later to basically all computers due to eventual convergence of cellphones/laptops - after nearly dying, Java may be truly getting a 'second chance at life' here, but only if Sun can make it a kind of de facto standard platform.
Or when people laughed at the notion of an email message that could automatically invoke executable code and install a virus just by being read (a la "good times" hoax :( ).
My mistake was thinking that this story might be amusing to some. Obviously, the need to criticize here is more important than the need to laugh
Don't let it bother you, shani is obviously just an idiot who, it would seem, doesn't actually have any non-academic experience coding C or C++. It was amusing to me simply because of the recognition of my own experiences :). As someone with (currently) about six years C++ experience and about ten years programming experience, I've got plenty of similar stories myself :) Writing out of array bounds onto other class members isn't always as obvious as it was in your case either, sometimes the index is derived in a complicated manner, and you obviously can't bounds-check every single time. Sometimes its just a cut-n-paste problem, e.g. duplicating the for-loop initialization for one array for another array of a different size, forgetting to change it in the for-loop etc. C++ has lots of potential pitfalls and room for these easy mistakes to make. Derived classes redefining a member already defined in a parent class, forgetting to initialize a member, modifying the parameters of a virtual function in the base class and forgetting to change overridden versions of the function in derived classes, so the derived versions don't get called, typecasting incorrectly etc etc. Some of these have produced some pretty hilarious results, like some really bizarre missile flight paths in our simulations, but you probably sorta had to be there :).
the use of 6 is pretty inexcusable. Even K&R had #define!!
Uh, WTF would that have helped? The bug would have been the same:
#define MOVELISTSIZE 6
struct player
{
coord movelist[MOVELISTSIZE];
};
player->movelist[MOVELISTSIZE].x = foo;
Its a 'simple' sort of mistake to make, most C/C++ coders with any reasonable amount of experience are likely to have similar stories to tell (myself included).
And WTF has "using abstraction" got to do with it? Could you explain how "using abstraction" could have avoided a little mistake like that? Lets see:
class Player
{
public:
void SetMovelistValue(int nIndex, float x, float y);
private:
coord movelist[MOVELISTSIZE];
};
Player->SetMovelistValue(MOVELISTSIZE, x, y);
Oops! Bug still there! I guess "using abstraction" had nothing to do with it then. What are you trying to say?
As the other poster said, all you're doing is "flexing your geek", and its pretty lame. Does it make you feel better about yourself to assert that you are some sort of Perl God who allegedly could code rings around the C/C++ programmers? Get over yourself. Perl does a lot of dirty work for you.
I bought a bed recently and stated clearly "phone before delivery". They phoned at 10:00 a.m. I sat and waited over six hours (phoning them inbetween to complain and ask what was going on, they just told me the driver was "on the way"). The driver eventually showed up at about 16:30.
Anyway, when I went back to the store a week later (to have the bed swopped for a different one) the lady happened to tell me that they had just fired their driving subcontractor :) Hehe, brilliant. She said "I can't have my customers wait six hours".
Let me get this straight: You put a Powermac G4 tower, an PowerTower Pro, and a monitor all in one box, and expected them to survive?
As he pointed out elsewhere on this thread, no, he didn't. He packed each of them into three separate boxes.
As for insurance, it was not available to him as an option.
Lastly, the packing WAS inspected by UPS before he shipped, and UPS accepted the packing.
And you get modded up to 5 for posting a bunch of incorrect assumptions that you made?
Also, have the UPS associate inspect your packaging before you send it off, so they can't complain about improper packing
As jutus pointed out elsewhere on this thread, UPS did actually inspect the packing before shipping.
I find it interesting that there not only seems to be a lot of UPS horror stories on this thread, but also that there seems to be a distinct lack of either Fedex or USPS horror stories. Quite telling. Conspicuous by its absence.
However, looking at the pictures, I dont think that the computers were packed properly
Maybe so, but looking at the severe amounts of damage these computers took (it is really *difficult* to inflict so much damage), I cannot see how it could have been anything other than outright vandalism. It just doesn't seem possible to me AT ALL that all that damage was the incidental result of the way packages are moved/handled. Actually, it looks more like someone took a baseball bat or a sledge-hammer and spent a good five or ten minutes bashing these computers, deliberately and malicously.
You tell us you're posting "in defense" of UPS, and then you tell us:
I have seen a Dell monitor box fall three stories without suffering so much as a dented edge. I have seen my coworkers jumping up and down on a Gateway box with the deliberate intention of destroying it?
WTF? Was that supposed to make us feel better about UPS? :)
In spite of the fact that I already think that people are incredibly stupid, and in spite of seeing decades of evidence of the incredible stupidity of people on probably at least a weekly basis, stories like this (these eBay auctions) still somehow manage to boggle my mind and make me shake my head in wonder and disbelief. I find myself searching for possible rational explanations. So far the only explanation I can come up with that makes sense to me is that perhaps the bidders on these auctions were mostly foreigners with very poor English skills (possibly having recently moved e.g. to the US), who would not only easily have misunderstood the descriptions (understanding probably mostly just the main keywords), but would themselves (in a sort of naive trusting of people, and in good faith) never have believed or even considered that anyone would attempt such ridiculous auctions. If that was the case, I wonder if there would be any legal implications. Probably not, but still, if somebody deliberately and knowingly conned a naive immigrant with poor English skills, it seems a bit on the shady side.
It's nice to see that a new buzzword has emerged to allow people to gloss-over topics they don't get
Perhaps it only seems that way to you because its a topic you don't understand. The term "genetic algorithm" is FAR from new, genetic algorithm research has been going on for decades (with some machine-learning-related texts dealing with "evolutionary programming" dating back to the 1960s), and the term describes a very specific (and actually somewhat mundane) AI technique. Its not a "general term" being used to describe something that they aren't willing to describe in the article, in fact, its pretty much a certainty that they chose that word precisely because it refers to the *exact technique* being used, and there is no ambiguity in using it if you know what genetic algorithms are. Hardly a buzzword.
legLess just wanted to prove to us all how much better and more cultured and "super-intellectual" he is than everyone else here; Dilbert is "beneath his level", so since the majority of people here enjoy Dilbert, this is how he declares his alleged "superiority" over the "common masses". Its boring, plain-old classism at its lamest. Reminds me of someone I knew who only listened to classical music, and considered anyone who could not also "appreciate" classical music to be beneath him. Personally, I doubt that legLess has read much of anything from Scott Adams, because he makes an extremely shallow analysis of the Dilbert comic strip. Scott Adams works contain many insightful philophical subtleties that many people seem to miss, and his humour books even more so.
I guess part of the problem here is the popular view that comics are not art, but are essentially worthless, except perhaps good for for a laugh but thats it. So people generally have the opinion that poetry is "high art" while comics are "low art", which is obviously untrue to anyone who has ever actually read any of the comics that don't fall into the 90% of sturgeons law (e.g. Pogo, Maus, Barefoot Gen etc). This is a subject that Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) also occasionally addressed in his comic strips.
If anyone doesn't think that the comics medium is capable of brilliant, subtle satire, I suggest they go read Walt Kelly's Pogo right now.
I'm not sure why legLess thinks that wanting to be rich makes somebody less worthy a satirist. Thats a ridiculous assertion.
Scott Adams also manages to bring some of the philosophical issues he deals with in his books "to the masses" (at least probably to the extent that that is possible). I guess some pseudo-intellectual classists resent that, because when philosophy starts to reach the masses, they no longer have something to use to proclaim their superiority over the masses.
Virtually every single one of Scott Adams books (that aren't 100% comic strips) contain plenty of insightful, interesting and thoughtful philosophical comments. Its difficult to miss, so I can't understand how you could have read any of his works without noticing it. Similarly, I found mblumber's "Adams is not known for writing super-intelligent commentaries on life" comments quite strange. Even his comic strips deal with philosophical and religous issues (such as the one where Dogbert postulates that God, the 'ultimate higher-level being', must be our future, not our past, because progressively higher-level systems in life are continually being developed from simpler, "building-block" organisms, and that we are just one step along the way). There are plenty of examples though. It boggles my mind that anyone can have read any of his books without noticing the obvious non-mainstream philosophical slant. If you've been reading Dilbert (and more generally anything of Scott Adams) as purely light humour, you've been missing out.
Yip, I really like C++ (i.e. I enjoy programming with it), but there's no question it isn't the best solution for everything. We use it at work for most our stuff because we need the speed (3d simulators), but for many types of projects its definitely not the best solution, with not only longer development and more LOC but also more bugs than other solutions (a good percentage being pointer-related bugs, e.g. dangling pointers, also things like uninitialized variables etc, and in general you spend more time with memory management). If you don't need speed, rather use things like Python/Tcl/VB/Delphi etc. Simpler, more maintainable, lower ADT (Application Development Time) etc.
There also seems to be a professionalism problem in software development - programmers often deviate from the project spec to add things that they want to add, just because its fun for them, with no regard to the impact on the deadline or whether or not the feature is required and/or even useful for the project. Project deadlines for bridges would also often slip if some of the engineers kept deciding halfway through that it "would be cool" if the bridge pillars "looked like giant penguins" or something. "Real" engineers have the professionalism to realise that they need to stick to the spec. With software its not quite so clear that you absolutely have to, so (unprofessional) software developers spend too much time near the beginning of the project adding fun, cool, useless things instead of concentrating on what needs to be done. Then for the last two weeks before the deadline SOMEBODY ELSE (usually me) usually ends up picking up the slack and working 16-hour shifts to get the program ready for delivery.
I keep having fights with one of the developers here, who is a good programmer, but he has *no* concept of deadlines, time, or priorities. Even the *management* have started multiplying his development time estimates by a factor of three (its usually the other way round!). He's always like "I'd like to add this", or "it would be really cool if we had this feature", or "but we're going to need this eventually anyway" (for future future projects that don't exist yet). And its always "it'll take less than a day", or "it'll only take a day or two". And it ALWAYS takes several times longer than "a day or two". And these things add up, he just doesn't see it, a few days here and there soon add up to a month or two. I can't get it into his head that even if it "only takes a day", as he insists, that thats one day that we don't have to spare, we're already running late as it is. Its simply not possible to add features without pushing your deadline further back, and he just doesn't get that. Its unprofessional, and its frustrating.
My biggest problem as project manager just seems to be getting people to work on what they're supposed to be doing. It doesn't help either that my manager keeps finding other things for the programmers to do. Some of the developers are professional, and will just focus on doing their jobs without requiring nanny assistance, but some of them you seem to need to check up on several times a day to make sure they're not doing the things they *want* to be doing. I shouldn't have to do that.
Yip. This settlement is about the best possible outcome to the case that Microsoft could ever have hoped for. Even Bill Gates was gushing on TV about how happy he was about it, which should immediately tell you just how ineffective this settlement is going to be. Microsoft won this case, big-time. At the OEMs I work with, the Microsoft tax is *still* implemented 100%, no new PCs may be sold without a legit copy of Windows. The only difference seems to be that instead of preferential pricing for OEMs, Microsoft now charges *all* OEMs the *HIGHEST* possible price for Windows (not the average of what they were making on Windows, so they're making much more now), and they still get to 'blame it on the justice department'. MS is still making exclusivity deals wherever it can (e.g. XBox + games). I suspect this three-person regulatory body (one of the three being appointed by Microsoft to boot) is going to be the most ineffective in the history of antitrust rulings/settlements.
You were going well up until this point:
Eventually, they'll get around to releasing a decent product
but that part didn't make sense to me, after all, this is MS we're talking about.
I can remember since the days of Windows 3 (about eight or nine years ago) that people have been hoping for Microsoft to eventually "release a decent product". We're still waiting for it. With every new release, people seem to forgive MS immediately and brush it off with "oh well, maybe the next version will be good, we'll endure the suffering in the meantime". (Perhaps XP is "it", but then is it really acceptable to wait close to *ten years*, and pay several times over during the wait, to get a half-decent product which is anyway several years behind what OSs should be by now, technologically? I can't think of a feature in any Microsoft Windows version that hadn't already been around for several years in some other system, and that includes XP)