My ClimatePrediction.net client is currently chewing away on a pair of scenarios which, the app tells me, have approximately 3000 hours (wall-clock) to complete. By your figures, I'm adding roughly a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere for every four iterations I process (assuming I only leave the computer on to run CPDN, which is questionable).
If this is correct, it would perhaps be well for the Boinc people to call this out on their FAQ...
Any "engineer" who implemented System A without checking the ICD (Interface Control Document) for System B, and not bothering to check the units assigned to each field, deserves to be fired, plain and simple. As well as the SEIT Lead (Systems Engineering Integration Team) who ran the SRR (System Requirements Review), PDR, CDR, etc.
Folks, unit conversion is not that difficult or uncommon. For anyone thinking that a conversion from English to Metric would magically obviate all unit conversions, and therefore eliminate the need to check for units, think again.
Anyone familiar with dec/bin/hex? Which of those should we "ban forever" because it's SO DIFFICULT to convert between them? How about deg/rad? Spherical/Cartesian? FRD/NED/ECEF/WGS84? Get a grip, people.
Also, it's not like the metric system solves any of the truly DIFFICULT unit problems. Length and weight are easy. Tell me, what's the metric unit for time? Well? So we're stuck with the bloody hour, 24 of which make a day, divisible into 60 minutes of 60 hours, with all those lovely leap years and leap seconds thrown into the mix. Or how about currency conversions, where the scaling factor changes minute-by-minute?
Put into Slashdot terms, note that if you get rid of the Imperial Inch, say goodbye to "point" font-sizes; no more will you be able to specify a simple 12pt (ie, 12/72 of an inch), but rather 4.233mm! Selection boxes just got wider, eating up all that valuable screen real-estate. Speaking of, no more DPI or PPI resolution metrics.
At the end of the day, can you imagine how many millions of man-hours of effort would go into such a conversion? For what? UNITY, so that every nation could be the same? I thought DIVERSITY was supposed to be the valued goal? Everyone who values their "non-standard" Linux or MacOS or whatever box should be concerned at the idea of forcibly moving everyone to The Same Standard because it would be Easier For I.T. that way.
I say, God save the Queen, and all her twips, arpents, and stones!
I have a 15" MBP at work. Fantastic machine. It occasionally gets the "CPU whine", but there are utilities to mitigate that. Even with that one glitch, it's the nicest computer I've ever used. (14yrs IT, XP/Unix user)
Many businesses -- even "most" -- are going to keep their important documents in Word...period. (I'm a vim/svn guy myself, so don't bother preaching to the choir.) The real question is, if use of Word itself is a requirement (as it very often is), then how can you add proper revision control to Microsoft Office?
By way of answer, I'm going to make a totally biased plug for my brother's product, DocumentLocator, which is designed to do exactly that.
when I went to grad school to get a masters in computer science, the tax law gave me no break whatsoever. I cannot deduct my tuition as a business expense.
Like I'd believe anything from an article which equated "IT Pros" with an "IT department." IT pros create things. IT departments install and support things...typically with laughably miserable results.
IT pros try to come up with new ways of using technology to improve business efficiency and open new markets. IT departments specialize in explaining why "no you're not allowed to do that [because it would make our job an eensie bit more difficult and we might actually have to think.]" (Chip on my shoulder? You bet!)
No, the folks you find in IT departments typically aren't "Mac people", if by "Mac people" you mean people who are interested in trying something different simply for the sake of finding out whether an alterative approach might actually be better once in awhile. On the other hand, "IT pros" recognize that a heterogenous environment is a *richer* environment, because every platform has unique strengths and contributes meaningfully to the enterprise.
Maybe there are some CompSci graduates who would make passable engineers, but the poster has a point: many CompSci "programmers" have no idea what engineering is about, as a discipline. As a fairly experienced and successful programmer, I learned that to my own surprise when I took a job at an aerospace firm.
Ask many programmers about their documentation, and they will either laugh or spit at you. They "don't have time" for documentation; "if it was hard for me to write, it should be hard for you to read." "Use the source, dumbass." Programmers tend to focus on the program -- the PRODUCT of their labors.
Engineers, in contrast, recognize that they are individuals within a long chain of people who will work on a project, and that clear communication between layers and across time can be of paramount importance. Generally, they value the PROCESS involved in solving a problem. There are good reasons for that.
Whether or not any one engineer is tasked at a particular time with a safety-critical assignment, engineers AS A PROFESSION are trained by hardliners who understand that, when engineers miss a "bug" in their system design, people die. Bridges collapse; ceilings fall; towers shatter; trains derail; airliners crash; automobiles overturn; spacecraft explode. Because of this, it is inbred in most university-trained engineers that PROCESS MATTERS; that peer-review is not an annoyance but a necessity; that requirement traceability is essential.
Many programmers, as you very well know, have very little patience with these things. "Let's just throw the beta into production, and if custies have any problems, we'll fix 'em in the weekend deployment." You know the attitude, and it is very real and prevalent. This is why CompSci graduates are often not welcome in defense projects, or any industry where casual errors can lead to catastrophic results.
I am a programmer, and I hang my CompSci degree proudly. But I am no engineer, and I have learned to know the difference.
what is my incentive to download a movie I can't burn to DVD and play on my home theater system?
Um, you get to watch the movie? That's plenty of incentive for me. I watch movies on computer all the time -- even when I own the DVD, I often play it on the computer. There are enough people like me to make this a decent business model -- even if it doesn't satisfy every potential customer in the world.
It costs them next to zero to distribute movies this way and the consumers nothing in return...Only in Korporate Amerika do people imagine that you can get something for nothing.
No, but it costs them considerably more than zero to make the movies in the first place. What's their incentive to keep making movies if people refuse to pay to watch them, because...oh right, "information is free."
you're still looking to at least an hour for a 1.4GB compressed copy, even longer if this service uses full 4.6GB uncompressed. I can go outside, wait for and take the bus, buy a hard copy, and get home all before this is done.
Hey, wow, you've just completely destroyed Amazon's business model! Why would anyone wait 2-14 days for shipping when then can drive down to the bookstore and get a copy in person? And catalog sales...Sears & Roebuck will never make any money off that!
Thanks for sharing the benefits of your M.B.A. with us.
Well, yeah. I had no interest in watching $1M Baby before now, but at quadruple the resolution...wow! And checkout those blemishes on Tom Cruise's chin! I knew it!
In Apple's defense (and I do appreciate the irony you point out), OS-X was, from the start, a far more "portable" operating system, vastly more suitable to loading on strange hardware. From it's NeXTSTEP heritage, OS-X could build on Motorola 68K systems. From it's OpenSTEP heritage, OX-X could already build on Intel x86 architectures. From it's Apple heritage, it could build on PPC systems. From it's BSD heritage, it could build on pretty much anything else. OS-X had been ported so much that it had developed a fairly flexible hardware abstraction layer.
In contrast, consider Windows, which has been successfully ported to...Alpha? Once, many years ago? Windows is far more intransigent about porting to new hardware platforms, because they've never needed to, never wanted to, and never put any friendly handles in to smooth the transition.
I confess, I don't see the interest in booting Linux on a Mac. I mean, I use Linux every day, yet I can't see what it would add to my Mac. I can _already_ run shell, X11, Apache, MySQL, g++, etc.
I fervently support the advantages of Linux over Windows (particularly for development and network applications), but I don't see nearly the same advantage of Linux over OS-X. While Linux has some niceties (being free helps), OS-X counterbalances many of those (better GUI & easier sysadmin, for starters).
Seriously: earlier threads are already debating why one would install Windows on a Mac (which to me is a no-brainer). So fill me in; why would you install Linux?
Sure, having a laptop would be nice but should everyone be required to get one?
An excellent point. At all universities, no. At some, absolutely. 50 little experiments in democracy, remember. Educational theory is advanced by trying new things in controlled environments and seeing what works out and what doesn't.
That can "force" some unsolicited (and occasionally disastrous) policies on K-12 students who may well be required to attend a certain school...but nobody is forced to go to one college or other. You choose a college that fits what you're looking for. If you're looking for a campus that is clearly trying to go all-digital, because you believe that would work well with your personal career aspirations or predilections, then this is for you. If not, feel free to look elsewhere.
I'm thinking...if an applicant can't afford the university fees, then they apply for financial aid...or go somewhere else? Kind of like happens with dorm fees, dining hall fees, athletic fees, textbook fees...?
Some professors only present one side of an argument, or selective history. Trapped in a classroom, with only the teacher's handouts for reference, students have little ability to debate on the spot. It would be cool to have Google handy when a teacher spouted off something that sounded stupid, or at least incomplete, and be able to refute it in real-time.
(Not that all professors would necessarily appreciate that...but education's a two-way street, neh?)
Agreed with your basic comment. I learned math from a chalkboard, and it seemed to work well enough. There's no friggin way that Microsoft Equation Editor is going to take the place of pencil and paper. (Though Matlab would certainly allow for much easier visualization...that's a plus.)
That said...I would have loved to have had a WiFi laptop when I was in college. Working on essays while leaning against a tree in the quad...that would have beat hell out of a crowded library lab or dank dorm room. And IM's during class would beat whispered side conversation and note-passing. I don't see anyway this would not be an overall Good Thing...just noting that it won't be equally useful in all areas:-)
I've about had enough of all these deprecatory "Brown's books suck" comments. His works succeeded spectacularly in the one metric for which any publisher prints any book, and most authors write them: to sell copies and make money. That's like saying "Bill Gates is an idiot because Windows sucks."
Most rich people get that way because their objective is not to make something perfect and pure, but to make something which will make them...rich. Complaining that you're a better writer, or programmer, than they, simply shows that you have different goals. (Except that the bitter envy redolent in such complaints hints otherwise, that perhaps you share the same goals but are simply far less effective at achieving them.)
Now, were you to say, "I didn't like his books," that would be quite all right. But plainly they don't "[objectively] suck," because they fulfill exactly what millions of readers wanted them to provide.
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting post...got me thinking.
My ClimatePrediction.net client is currently chewing away on a pair of scenarios which, the app tells me, have approximately 3000 hours (wall-clock) to complete. By your figures, I'm adding roughly a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere for every four iterations I process (assuming I only leave the computer on to run CPDN, which is questionable).
If this is correct, it would perhaps be well for the Boinc people to call this out on their FAQ...
> its 2 similar ways of doing OOP (new style vs. old style classes?) seems a little to complicated
Technically, Perl has two OOP syntaxes, too:
my $obj = new Foo();
my $obj = Foo->new();
Folks, unit conversion is not that difficult or uncommon. For anyone thinking that a conversion from English to Metric would magically obviate all unit conversions, and therefore eliminate the need to check for units, think again.
Anyone familiar with dec/bin/hex? Which of those should we "ban forever" because it's SO DIFFICULT to convert between them? How about deg/rad? Spherical/Cartesian? FRD/NED/ECEF/WGS84? Get a grip, people.
Also, it's not like the metric system solves any of the truly DIFFICULT unit problems. Length and weight are easy. Tell me, what's the metric unit for time? Well? So we're stuck with the bloody hour, 24 of which make a day, divisible into 60 minutes of 60 hours, with all those lovely leap years and leap seconds thrown into the mix. Or how about currency conversions, where the scaling factor changes minute-by-minute?
Put into Slashdot terms, note that if you get rid of the Imperial Inch, say goodbye to "point" font-sizes; no more will you be able to specify a simple 12pt (ie, 12/72 of an inch), but rather 4.233mm! Selection boxes just got wider, eating up all that valuable screen real-estate. Speaking of, no more DPI or PPI resolution metrics.
At the end of the day, can you imagine how many millions of man-hours of effort would go into such a conversion? For what? UNITY, so that every nation could be the same? I thought DIVERSITY was supposed to be the valued goal? Everyone who values their "non-standard" Linux or MacOS or whatever box should be concerned at the idea of forcibly moving everyone to The Same Standard because it would be Easier For I.T. that way.
I say, God save the Queen, and all her twips, arpents, and stones!
I have a 15" MBP at work. Fantastic machine. It occasionally gets the "CPU whine", but there are utilities to mitigate that. Even with that one glitch, it's the nicest computer I've ever used. (14yrs IT, XP/Unix user)
Many businesses -- even "most" -- are going to keep their important documents in Word...period. (I'm a vim/svn guy myself, so don't bother preaching to the choir.) The real question is, if use of Word itself is a requirement (as it very often is), then how can you add proper revision control to Microsoft Office?
By way of answer, I'm going to make a totally biased plug for my brother's product, DocumentLocator, which is designed to do exactly that.
Lie. (But read quickly.)
IT pros try to come up with new ways of using technology to improve business efficiency and open new markets. IT departments specialize in explaining why "no you're not allowed to do that [because it would make our job an eensie bit more difficult and we might actually have to think.]" (Chip on my shoulder? You bet!)
No, the folks you find in IT departments typically aren't "Mac people", if by "Mac people" you mean people who are interested in trying something different simply for the sake of finding out whether an alterative approach might actually be better once in awhile. On the other hand, "IT pros" recognize that a heterogenous environment is a *richer* environment, because every platform has unique strengths and contributes meaningfully to the enterprise.
Ask many programmers about their documentation, and they will either laugh or spit at you. They "don't have time" for documentation; "if it was hard for me to write, it should be hard for you to read." "Use the source, dumbass." Programmers tend to focus on the program -- the PRODUCT of their labors.
Engineers, in contrast, recognize that they are individuals within a long chain of people who will work on a project, and that clear communication between layers and across time can be of paramount importance. Generally, they value the PROCESS involved in solving a problem. There are good reasons for that.
Whether or not any one engineer is tasked at a particular time with a safety-critical assignment, engineers AS A PROFESSION are trained by hardliners who understand that, when engineers miss a "bug" in their system design, people die. Bridges collapse; ceilings fall; towers shatter; trains derail; airliners crash; automobiles overturn; spacecraft explode. Because of this, it is inbred in most university-trained engineers that PROCESS MATTERS; that peer-review is not an annoyance but a necessity; that requirement traceability is essential.
Many programmers, as you very well know, have very little patience with these things. "Let's just throw the beta into production, and if custies have any problems, we'll fix 'em in the weekend deployment." You know the attitude, and it is very real and prevalent. This is why CompSci graduates are often not welcome in defense projects, or any industry where casual errors can lead to catastrophic results.
I am a programmer, and I hang my CompSci degree proudly. But I am no engineer, and I have learned to know the difference.
Thanks for sharing the benefits of your M.B.A. with us.
If Warner Bros was smart, they'd consult a lawyer before distributing a 20th Century Fox film :-)
Well, yeah. I had no interest in watching $1M Baby before now, but at quadruple the resolution...wow! And checkout those blemishes on Tom Cruise's chin! I knew it!
In Apple's defense (and I do appreciate the irony you point out), OS-X was, from the start, a far more "portable" operating system, vastly more suitable to loading on strange hardware. From it's NeXTSTEP heritage, OS-X could build on Motorola 68K systems. From it's OpenSTEP heritage, OX-X could already build on Intel x86 architectures. From it's Apple heritage, it could build on PPC systems. From it's BSD heritage, it could build on pretty much anything else. OS-X had been ported so much that it had developed a fairly flexible hardware abstraction layer.
In contrast, consider Windows, which has been successfully ported to...Alpha? Once, many years ago? Windows is far more intransigent about porting to new hardware platforms, because they've never needed to, never wanted to, and never put any friendly handles in to smooth the transition.
I confess, I don't see the interest in booting Linux on a Mac. I mean, I use Linux every day, yet I can't see what it would add to my Mac. I can _already_ run shell, X11, Apache, MySQL, g++, etc.
I fervently support the advantages of Linux over Windows (particularly for development and network applications), but I don't see nearly the same advantage of Linux over OS-X. While Linux has some niceties (being free helps), OS-X counterbalances many of those (better GUI & easier sysadmin, for starters).
Seriously: earlier threads are already debating why one would install Windows on a Mac (which to me is a no-brainer). So fill me in; why would you install Linux?
I'm thinking $14 grand would stand-in for an outpouring of apologies. It would for me :-)
That can "force" some unsolicited (and occasionally disastrous) policies on K-12 students who may well be required to attend a certain school...but nobody is forced to go to one college or other. You choose a college that fits what you're looking for. If you're looking for a campus that is clearly trying to go all-digital, because you believe that would work well with your personal career aspirations or predilections, then this is for you. If not, feel free to look elsewhere.
I'm thinking...if an applicant can't afford the university fees, then they apply for financial aid...or go somewhere else? Kind of like happens with dorm fees, dining hall fees, athletic fees, textbook fees...?
(Not that all professors would necessarily appreciate that...but education's a two-way street, neh?)
They have these new things called "thumbdrives" now, that store WHOLE NOTEBOOKS on keychains. You should try one. They're spiffy.
Compared to the cost of a 4yr undergrad education, that's a pretty menial difference :-) Add it onto your loan!
That said...I would have loved to have had a WiFi laptop when I was in college. Working on essays while leaning against a tree in the quad...that would have beat hell out of a crowded library lab or dank dorm room. And IM's during class would beat whispered side conversation and note-passing. I don't see anyway this would not be an overall Good Thing...just noting that it won't be equally useful in all areas :-)
I bought my "priceless" Cthulhu edition on eBay for $3. YMMV.
Most rich people get that way because their objective is not to make something perfect and pure, but to make something which will make them...rich. Complaining that you're a better writer, or programmer, than they, simply shows that you have different goals. (Except that the bitter envy redolent in such complaints hints otherwise, that perhaps you share the same goals but are simply far less effective at achieving them.)
Now, were you to say, "I didn't like his books," that would be quite all right. But plainly they don't "[objectively] suck," because they fulfill exactly what millions of readers wanted them to provide.