Memory exists to be used. If memory is not in use, you are wasting it.
While I grant this statement is in a sense true, a system designer would do well to ponder the distinction between "not used" and "freely available".
RAM that is not currently being used, but which will be required for the next operation is not "wasted"; it is being held in reserve for future use. So when you put that "unused" RAM to use, the remaining unused RAM, plus the RAM you can release quickly, has to be greater than the amount of physical RAM the user is likely to need on short notice. Guess wrong, and you've done him no favors.
I'm not sure what benchmark you are using to say Vista's vm manager is "reasonably smart"; so far as I know no sensible vm scheme flushes swaps out pages if there is enough RAM to go around.
My own experience with Vista over about eighteen months was that it is fine as long as you don't do anything out of the ordinary, but if you suddenly needed a very large chunk of virtual memory, say a GB or so, Vista would be caught flat footed with a ton of pages it needed to get onto disk. Thereafter, it apparently never had much use for those pages, because you can release the memory you asked for and allocate it again without any fuss. It's just that first time. What was worse was that apparently Vista tried to (a) grow the page file in little chunks and (b) put those little chunks in the smallest stretch of free disk it could find. I had really mediocre performance with my workloads which required swapping with only 2-3GB of RAM, and I finally discovered that the pagefile had been split into tens of thousands of fragments! Deleting the page file, then manually creating a 2GB pagefile, brought performance back up to reasonable.
One of the lessons of this story is to beware of assuming "unused" is the same as "available", when it comes to resources. Another is not to take any drastic steps when it comes to using resources that you can't undo quickly. Another is that local optimizations don't always add up to global optimizations. Finally, don't assume too much about a user.
If I may wax philosophical here, one thing I've observed is that most problems we have in business, or as engineers, doesn't come from what we don't know, or even the things we believe that aren't true. It's the things we know but don't pay attention to. A lot of that is, in my experience, fixing something in front of us that is a problem, without any thought of the other things that might be connected to it. Everybody knows that grabbing resources you don't strictly need is a bad thing, but it is a kind of shotgun optimization where you don't have to know exactly where the problem is.
The problem I see with most deterrence arguments is that they assume criminals are rational, and weigh the costs and benefits of a crime the way a lawful person would. I don't think they do. I think that violent criminals don't weigh consequences the way ordinary people do, they're a lot more impulsive and aggressive.
Now I'm a liberal, and I don't have anything wrong with people owning guns. I think that people who have good reason to carry concealed firearms should be able to, although I'm not a big fan of everybody carrying concealed firearms (because for the reasons above I think it only makes it worse). However, I would not like to see anybody who needs to carry a firearm carrying one of these.
The main problem I see is that it is a single shot. The ammunition had better be pretty powerful then, given that the user is presumably physically unable to shoot a conventional pistol, and the situations the user is supposed to be using it in, we can't count on accurate shot placement. Even against a single, unarmed assailant, I wouldn't count on this making anybody safer. If anything, brandishing one of these things may provoke a more aggressive attack, and maybe even provide legal defense for the assailant.
No, I think this is pretty clearly a publicity stunt for a novelty toy of a gun. Anybody who takes this seriously as a way of improving the security of the elderly who are too physically frail to use a better weapon has to have a screw loose somewhere.
Actually, the ultimate antithesis to creativity is the standard television series. The theory is if you like a show, you tune in week after week to see more of the same thing. Do something different, and you piss the fans off.
Faced with the challenge of adapting each and every episode to the fans' expectations, the creative challenges of adapting an entire series isn't so daunting. It's like getting the regular customer who always buys the curry to try the saag paneer; that's much less risky than tweaking your curry recipe.
I've said this for years. You leave a you-shaped hole in the people around you when you die; and they in the people around them. Added up, it's a kind of immortality. After all "I" am not a collection of cells, I think of myself more as a collection of habits, behaviors, ideas and beliefs.
Well, you might not like pedants, but they play an important role. People use terms like MVC as if they were magical talismans.
My beef with MVC is that it is so often part of a "pattern first" design approach. The MVC fairy dust is so often chosen, and then assumed to be doing its magical job. If you look you find all kinds of bleeding of responsibilities across classes until the pattern exists formally but not practically. This is particularly true when you select the pattern by selecting a framework that "provides" this pattern for you.
In an ideal world, MVC would be common, but not have a commonly recognizable name.
I think it is most important to see patterns as part of a development process. It's OK to mix presentation and business logic code early in the process, although obviously not ideal. The important thing is that every time you work on a piece of software you clarify it and gather distributed assumptions into central locations. That process will naturally generate MVC along the way. The key is to reduce the net coupling of the system components as the system grows.
Reminds of an old Jimmy Wang-Yu movie. He's trying to teach his students the secrets of jumping, which it turns out have nothing to do with plyometrics and everything to do with mentally altering your body weight. He has this huge wicker basket filled with stones, and he makes the students run around on the edge while he removes stones. They don't believe it's possible, so he dumps all the stones, and runs around the edge of the basket without tipping.
Later he and his students are attending a huge tournament held in an outside arena, cordoned off with curtains thirty feet tall. One of the competitors is a Japanese ninja who,instead of walking through the entrance jumps over the curtain.
Jimmy raises one eyebrow, half turns to his students, laconically remarking, "Nice jumping." You know all the students are thinking that he'll make them hit the old rice baskets like madmen when he gets them home.
In any case, what you're wanting for airplane work is good old fashioned southern fried gong-fu -- like in the old 1970s Shaw Brothers movies. You know the choreography: arm-bridge, arm-bridge, leg-trap, arm-bridge, jump (for a little variety). It evolved to fight in constrained areas like crowded alleys and small boats.
Mathematics is an abstract game of counting, built up into great complexity.
That's either immensely profound, or it's plain wrong. I'm leaning towards... wrong. You can't build up the system of real numbers by counting. You have to introduce more axioms, such as closure under the subtraction and square root operations, or geometric axioms, or plain numbery notions like Dedekind cuts to go beyond counting numbers.
No you can't understand the world by counting, even elaborate forms of counting. It'd be more accurate to say we understand our world by symbolizing. Bertrand Russel went down the path of reducing all mathematics to symbolic logic than any mortal had an business going. By the way 1 + 1 does not always equal 2, even in this universe; it may, for example, equal 1 under the rules of Boolean algebra. Different rules, different results, different applications.
Now I don't know what counts as "profound", but one wonders about the fact that we formulate our understanding of the universe in terms of mathematics. Insofar as the universe can be counted on to be explicable, it has to be limited, and so we can choose various kinds of mathematics (or symbolic postulates) to represent those limitation conveniently. But mathematics isn't limited by physical possibilty. 1 pound plus 1 pound equals 2 pounds; 1 (true) + 1 (true) can equal 1 if we choose a different set of postulates.
But is this a two way street? Is there something about the universe that can't be captured by mathematics? I'd be tempted to conjecture that this is a meaningless question, except these folks seem to have devised a kind of oracle that tells something about the decidability of a mathematical proposition.
So, OK smarty pants researchers, how does it work? Can we, in principle, model the process by which it does this? If not, we've found a place where the operation of the universe transcends our ability to understand it by symbolizing. Maybe that's not "profound" but it's... intriguing.
Well, sure. Students should be able to write a bit of code, but why should software engineering be different from any other engineering?
When you get out of school with a freshly minted degree, you ought to have some knowledge of how bridges are built. Bridges are the civil engineers fetish objects, after all. But nobody trusts you to design one. About the only thing they'll trust you to do is to calculate how much paint will be needed to paint the lines on the roadway. If you don't screw that up, maybe they'll let you calculate how much paint goes on the bridge itself. Succeed there and they'll let you check somebody else's calculations.
This is not to say students shouldn't learn programming. They should, but we should be mindful of diminishing returns and the uniqueness of this opportunity in their careers. If you are programming for your career, you are constantly getting better at the craft, but when will you become better at the theory? You are bounded by the things you have done and thoughts you have had, and perhaps you can push those boundaries back, but not as much as the whole scope of human thought on the subject.
I dunno. The world doesn't "need" people arguing over anything. It needs certain side effects of argumentation.
Anyway, nobody I know believes that P=NP. If it were proven, then it certainly would be a highly practical result.
If it turns out that PNP, that is also very practical. Assuming that (as most people do) means that we have a mathematical test for feasibility. This is practically unique in engineering. In civil engineering, a bridge with a span of a hundred feet is obviously feasible, and a bridge with a span of a thousand miles is almost certainly unfeasible, but nobody can say where the dividing line comes, the point where introducing new materials, clever truss designs, and shear overbuilding cannot stretch the span another centimeter.
In fact, in engineering when you run into something remotely like that, it's not considered engineering; it's physics. A mechanical engineer will look at a contraption and decide it is impractical because it violates the laws of thermodynamics. Exactly why the thermodynamics are as they are is a profound question which doesn't very much concern the engineer, but they were well established empirically long before theoretical physics was ready to even speculate. P NP is analogous, in that the evidence for it is empirical and as solid as empirical evidence can be. It just ought to be provable or disprovable mathematically, as it'd be nice to formulate thermodynamics in terms of a more fundamental theory.
In any case, having been in the business for a long time, the line between software engineering and theoretical computer science is twisty and dynamic. The rise of Internet businesses gave software engineering a serious kick in the pants, both in terms of construction techniques, but also in terms of algorithmic design. Google is a company founded on special expertise in algorithms. Amazon and Netflix are companies that make considerable use of algorithms for marketing purposes; this may not be as precise as we'd like it to be, but as in Asimov's psychohistory, it's the statistically aggregated results that count.
The stock market dropped dramatically on the "news". Except the news is just the aggregation of other news. There wasn't any new facts in hand.
The whole idea of the Efficient Market Theory is that the market integrates all the facts and arrives at a rationally optimal price. It should not be possible to affect prices without introducing new facts.
The NBER uses different criteria than the "two quarter rule". After all it's just a made-up term. Back in the day what we are experienced was called by the wonderfully descriptive term "panic". "Depression" was a word that was less scary... until the Great Depression changed that forever. So "recession" is the polite term.
I think the definition you choose really depends on what you intend to use it for. It's for knowing when to break the glass on the box containing the contingency plans for use "in case of recession". The "two quarter" rule means that you can't even say whether you're in a recession until you've reached six months. In that case most recessions are essentially over. Still, this probably works well for business planning, where plans don't get updated more than quarterly, and a one quarter decline is too short to read much into.
At the other end of the scale, I doubt the word "recession" appears in the Fed's model at all. It's too imprecise for their purposes, and they'd like to avoid recessions, at least ones caused by money supply issues, which you can't do when you have to wait six months before you react.
I never got into FPS games, but I did at one point have a serious Sim City habit. The point of a game is to get you into a kind of "flow state"; so any game with a dynamically evolving situation that requires just the right amount of attention can do the job. Sim City worked because the city starts out growing, and once it gets to the size where expansion isn't rewarding anymore there's always a problem cropping up some place.
It seems to me that humanitarian relief is something that could be simulated in a game. Many great games, computer or otherwise, are about resource management. Do you put your resources into feeding a population in place? Or do you build refugee camps? Refugee camps centralize a lot of logistical problems, but by doing so increase dislocation, and can present persistent, long term security and development problems.
Like any other simulation game, the devil is in the details. To be playable a game has to realistic enough to be convincing and interesting, but not so realistic it is impossible to play.
Now I'll go out on a limb here and conjecture that most of the time, when people advocate the genocide of a group, they don't intend to give the group in question a say in the matter.
As a fan of math, I don't accept your logic. This would make everybody who has an opinion of their future behavior liars, whether or not that opinion was correct.
In any case, didn't I in effect say that liberals are often hypocrites? So are conservatives. Most people are hypocrites. Of the non-hypocrites, most of them are nut cases who throw the baby of common sense out with the bathwater of inconsistency. Very few people sincerely live their principles, and nobody manages it perfectly.
I don't buy the slippery slope argument. Of course, the real line between hate speech and other speech is fuzzy, and any line you draw is somewhat arbitrary.
But this is true of all restrictions on speech, for example the ones that say you can't blare your opinions over a loudspeaker at 3am in a residential neighborhood, or those that say you can't publish details of troop movements during war time. In these cases restrictions are supposed to be narrowly tailored to meet an overwhelming and legitimate government purpose. However, they still involve drawing sharp lines through fuzzy borders. If a slippery slope is what we fear, then drawing the lines conservatively should suffice. The law draws sharp lines in fuzzy territories all the time, as in the extent of trademark rights, or when you can cross your neighbor's property. If it didn't, it would have little practical use.
No. I think the problem with hate speech laws is that such laws cannot in most cases meet the needs they are supposed to serve at all. You can't stop people from hating and spreading hate, or from being stupid and spreading stupidity. Since that is what hate speech laws are supposed to do, they can't meet the narrow tailoring standard. In certain, temporary situations exceptions might apply, such as during the de-Nazification of Germany. However that's in a situation with a narrow scope in time and topic.
A good rule of thumb is that any restriction on speech is unlikely to accomplish its purpose is more likely to do mischief.
The problem with the "clear and present danger" standard is that "danger" is in the eye of the beholder.
If the government is taking an action, say going to war, for the benefit of the people, then opposing that action can be seen as endangering the country. In the run up to the 2004 election, there was considerable opinion to the effect that talk against the war put the troops in danger. Justice Holmes fell into this bit of confusion himself: the "danger" being that opposition to the draft would deny the benefits intended by the government in instating a draft.
Such a standard is not consistent with a free society in which the merits and disadvantages of government policies can be debated vigorously. The "imminent lawless action" is a much more precise way to deal with what Justice Holmes' was getting at. "Imminent" means faster than an officer of the law could react. Thus you can advocate rioting as a form of political expression, you just can't goad an unruly crowd into rioting because the police would not be able to protect the public safety.
The "Fire in a crowded theater" quote is from Oliver W. Holmes opinion in Shrenck v. United States, which held that the government could outlaw the distribution of pamphlets criticizing the draft during war time. This opinion was also the source of another favorite right wing phrase, the "clear and present danger".
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
The "fire in a theater" and "clear and present danger" have been the touchstones for the right wing when it comes to suppressing what they consider unpatriotic speech. Lately these more erudite phrases have fallen into disfavor, in favor of a simpler epithet: traitor.
Holmes' extreme position was later moderated by Brandenberg v. Ohio, in which the court held that only incitement to immediate illegal action could be barred. This represents the current position of most liberals in the US with respect to "hate speech": that only incitement should be made publicly illegal. WIthin private institutions, different standards and values apply.
In any case, note that our right wing victim is playing bait and switch with us here. There are no "hate speech" laws in the United States for him to be victimized by. He's also confusing the situation Canada, particularly the distinction between national hate speech laws and regional tribunals. The tribunals have indeed stepped over the reasonability line in some cases, although it is a bit paranoid to call them " kangaroo courts to suppress free speech and the free exchange of ideas".
Advocating genocide or hatred against a group is not exactly the "free exchange of ideas"; I wouldn't dignify bigotry with the name. It's just that you can't outlaw stupidity, you can only drive it underground. It is not the utility of bigotry that must be preserved, but its visibility.
In that, Brandenberg may have got it right. If you expect, as a direct consequence of your speech, that others will commit a crime, you may well be a participant in that crime. If you get up in front of an angry mob and say, "So and so at 123 Maple Street is a black man who raped white girls," knowing full well that the result will be a lynch mob, that is not about expressing ideas, it's about seeing that somebody gets lynched without getting your fingerprints on it.
Yes. But we don't have our own network that feeds us back our viewpoint all day long. We scarcely have any print media left for that matter. It's not a profitable viewpoint.
I suppose MSNBC might be a counter example of somebody trying to grab a distinct market segment off of Fox, and there is some legitimacy to that. But after all they took Olbermann and Matthews off their live event anchoring because they'd be perceived as biased. I think that was a good decision, but it is not something Fox would ever do.
And that's one fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative. A liberal values, at least in principle, contrary viewpoints. Naturally, we don't live our principles any more consistently than conservatives do, but those principles are, in fact, different when it comes to the value of expanding one's world view.
Well, you'd be a fool to buy MS SQL for its enterprise capabilities.
It has its strengths, of course, but it's most important strength is it is the default database slice of the Microsoft deployment stack and is well integrated with Microsoft development tools. For modest projects it provides the kinds of advantages MySQL does in the LAMP stack.
I'm not saying it is a bad product, depending on your needs. Nor am I saying that you can't do "enterprise applications" (whatever those are) if you design around its limitations. I'm just saying that if I weren't developing around a completely Microsoft based solution, I wouldn't give MS SQL a second glance. There are cheaper (open source) solutions on the low end, and more scalable solutions on the high end.
If maximum upward scalability from a PC host starting point was required, I'd go with Oracle. The fit on the low end is a bit awkward, but it's workable. You've got to be careful when you license Oracle because you can spend too much money very easily, but if you know what you're doing Oracle is scalable and cost-efficient. If you don't know what you're doing, that's a different affair altogether.
Yes, but Snow's famous map was really an innovative use of an existing technique: mapping. In fact, Snow's map, while effective, is quite crude. Water borne illness of the era is a special case: in most public health applications such a crude map of mortality is not usually so effective, because infection carriers tend to be mobile.
Nightingale's "Coxcomb" diagram is quite interesting. In effect it is a twelve month bar graph wrapped around in a circle, and scaled by proportional area rather than radius. I don't particularly like the way she applied it to a single year, but it might be an interesting way to aggregate seasonal data across years.
Maps of instances and time series graphs are, of course, useful. But they simplistic and unreliable. It's not proof of anything that clusters "jump out" at you; not unless you can control for things like population. Again, they're worth doing, but the kind of success Snow had was a special case.
As it happens, I recently hacked progress bars into a mobile application for transferring data over potentially low bandwidth channels.
In an object oriented situation, you create an "Observable" interface which other object classes can use, achieving a neat separation between the visual effect and the underlying task.
Something similar can be done by having a special "cp" command line switch that outputs parseable progress data to stderr, but such an approach, while getting the job done, is less flexible. You can't interact with you "cp" instance, demanding more or less detail, or different kinds of detail, unless you provide some kind of input (presuming you aren't doing "cp -..."). Once you go down that route, you really ought to standardize ALL commands, which really is a pain in the ass, and won't work in every case (e.g., copying from stdin leaves that unavailable for communicating with your program instance). Whether or not you are semantically using object orientation, you are in fact making all command line utilities a subclass of some kind of complex and poorly defined "command line utility" class.
From my design perspective, "cp" is a user interface. It also happens to be a utility, it's just that both aspects of this are wrapped up into a single piece of software. That's a lot like how people working earlier on the mobile project I spoke of had treated progress bars; the interface is tied directly to the code which does the work. I'm not religiously opposed to this, but unless it's a huge amount of work for some reason, I prefer to break things up.
Since copying can take anything from negligible to a very, very long time, and copying is a very common kind of operation, it'd make sense to create a copier class so that the state and policies of objects in that class can be altered dynamically over the course of their operation. Then I'd make the command line "cp" utility a front end for creating and invoking that object, and handling error and status output. It wouldn't need to give you access to every capability of the copy object, just enough to do the job, which simplifies testing.
The truth is that it's not really all that onerous to build software this way. The only reason not to is because we have all this code that's already been built another way. And like I said, that's fine. It's proven code and gets the job done. But at some time you have to look at the complexity of a monolithic utility and ask whether adding to it is the right way.
I know it's not a popular sentiment here, but Beware the church of climate alarm.
Count me as neither one of the faithful, nor one of the satanists. Of the two sides, neither is free of "religious zeal". Witness, as it were, the choice of prophets here; Dr. Plimer's opinion is treated as authoritative even though he is outside the mainstream of scientific opinion on this. This doesn't mean he is wrong, of course, but it doesn't mean his opinions are more credible than those of the IPCC, for example.
I can hardly count the number of managers I've met who've claimed to be "visual thinkers". Without denying such a thing might exist, I've seldom seen any evidence of outstanding "visual reasoning" from such people.
For example, I often use diagrams as an adjunct to my reasoning, and find that "visual thinkers" often have strong opinions about the aesthetic aspects of these diagrams. Seldom is the opinion about things in the diagram that carry semantic information: spatial, thematic or topological relationships for example. Furthermore, their aesthetic contributions aren't very aesthetically sophisticated, demonstrating of bad typography choices, cluttered compositions, insensitivity to color complementarity and value.
I call their claims into doubt because I have known unusual individuals who could be described as visual thinkers. One was an architect who was nearly incomprehensible without a pencil in his hand, but wonderfully eloquent with one. None of these people ever claimed to be "visual thinkers", as if that were a loftier kind of cognition. I suspect that's because it is not how a "visual thinker" would conceive of or express the distinction between themselves and "normal".
It is my opinion that the popularity of claiming to be a "visual thinker" stems from "visual reasoning" not being part of most people's education. An opinion justified as "visual thinking" is therefore unlikely to meet an informed challenge. Put most "visual thinkers" in front of a panel of artists or architects, and they will be reluctant to claim that label for themselves.
I happen to think that computer based presentations are very useful communications tools, but you really have to start by having something worth saying.
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Memory exists to be used. If memory is not in use, you are wasting it.
While I grant this statement is in a sense true, a system designer would do well to ponder the distinction between "not used" and "freely available".
RAM that is not currently being used, but which will be required for the next operation is not "wasted"; it is being held in reserve for future use. So when you put that "unused" RAM to use, the remaining unused RAM, plus the RAM you can release quickly, has to be greater than the amount of physical RAM the user is likely to need on short notice. Guess wrong, and you've done him no favors.
I'm not sure what benchmark you are using to say Vista's vm manager is "reasonably smart"; so far as I know no sensible vm scheme flushes swaps out pages if there is enough RAM to go around.
My own experience with Vista over about eighteen months was that it is fine as long as you don't do anything out of the ordinary, but if you suddenly needed a very large chunk of virtual memory, say a GB or so, Vista would be caught flat footed with a ton of pages it needed to get onto disk. Thereafter, it apparently never had much use for those pages, because you can release the memory you asked for and allocate it again without any fuss. It's just that first time. What was worse was that apparently Vista tried to (a) grow the page file in little chunks and (b) put those little chunks in the smallest stretch of free disk it could find. I had really mediocre performance with my workloads which required swapping with only 2-3GB of RAM, and I finally discovered that the pagefile had been split into tens of thousands of fragments! Deleting the page file, then manually creating a 2GB pagefile, brought performance back up to reasonable.
One of the lessons of this story is to beware of assuming "unused" is the same as "available", when it comes to resources. Another is not to take any drastic steps when it comes to using resources that you can't undo quickly. Another is that local optimizations don't always add up to global optimizations. Finally, don't assume too much about a user.
If I may wax philosophical here, one thing I've observed is that most problems we have in business, or as engineers, doesn't come from what we don't know, or even the things we believe that aren't true. It's the things we know but don't pay attention to. A lot of that is, in my experience, fixing something in front of us that is a problem, without any thought of the other things that might be connected to it. Everybody knows that grabbing resources you don't strictly need is a bad thing, but it is a kind of shotgun optimization where you don't have to know exactly where the problem is.
The problem I see with most deterrence arguments is that they assume criminals are rational, and weigh the costs and benefits of a crime the way a lawful person would. I don't think they do. I think that violent criminals don't weigh consequences the way ordinary people do, they're a lot more impulsive and aggressive.
Now I'm a liberal, and I don't have anything wrong with people owning guns. I think that people who have good reason to carry concealed firearms should be able to, although I'm not a big fan of everybody carrying concealed firearms (because for the reasons above I think it only makes it worse). However, I would not like to see anybody who needs to carry a firearm carrying one of these.
The main problem I see is that it is a single shot. The ammunition had better be pretty powerful then, given that the user is presumably physically unable to shoot a conventional pistol, and the situations the user is supposed to be using it in, we can't count on accurate shot placement. Even against a single, unarmed assailant, I wouldn't count on this making anybody safer. If anything, brandishing one of these things may provoke a more aggressive attack, and maybe even provide legal defense for the assailant.
No, I think this is pretty clearly a publicity stunt for a novelty toy of a gun. Anybody who takes this seriously as a way of improving the security of the elderly who are too physically frail to use a better weapon has to have a screw loose somewhere.
Actually, the ultimate antithesis to creativity is the standard television series. The theory is if you like a show, you tune in week after week to see more of the same thing. Do something different, and you piss the fans off.
Faced with the challenge of adapting each and every episode to the fans' expectations, the creative challenges of adapting an entire series isn't so daunting. It's like getting the regular customer who always buys the curry to try the saag paneer; that's much less risky than tweaking your curry recipe.
need to learn the meaning of "irony".
I've said this for years. You leave a you-shaped hole in the people around you when you die; and they in the people around them. Added up, it's a kind of immortality. After all "I" am not a collection of cells, I think of myself more as a collection of habits, behaviors, ideas and beliefs.
... now go home.
Well, you might not like pedants, but they play an important role. People use terms like MVC as if they were magical talismans.
My beef with MVC is that it is so often part of a "pattern first" design approach. The MVC fairy dust is so often chosen, and then assumed to be doing its magical job. If you look you find all kinds of bleeding of responsibilities across classes until the pattern exists formally but not practically. This is particularly true when you select the pattern by selecting a framework that "provides" this pattern for you.
In an ideal world, MVC would be common, but not have a commonly recognizable name.
I think it is most important to see patterns as part of a development process. It's OK to mix presentation and business logic code early in the process, although obviously not ideal. The important thing is that every time you work on a piece of software you clarify it and gather distributed assumptions into central locations. That process will naturally generate MVC along the way. The key is to reduce the net coupling of the system components as the system grows.
Reminds of an old Jimmy Wang-Yu movie. He's trying to teach his students the secrets of jumping, which it turns out have nothing to do with plyometrics and everything to do with mentally altering your body weight. He has this huge wicker basket filled with stones, and he makes the students run around on the edge while he removes stones. They don't believe it's possible, so he dumps all the stones, and runs around the edge of the basket without tipping.
Later he and his students are attending a huge tournament held in an outside arena, cordoned off with curtains thirty feet tall. One of the competitors is a Japanese ninja who ,instead of walking through the entrance jumps over the curtain.
Jimmy raises one eyebrow, half turns to his students, laconically remarking, "Nice jumping." You know all the students are thinking that he'll make them hit the old rice baskets like madmen when he gets them home.
In any case, what you're wanting for airplane work is good old fashioned southern fried gong-fu -- like in the old 1970s Shaw Brothers movies. You know the choreography: arm-bridge, arm-bridge, leg-trap, arm-bridge, jump (for a little variety). It evolved to fight in constrained areas like crowded alleys and small boats.
That's either immensely profound, or it's plain wrong. I'm leaning towards ... wrong. You can't build up the system of real numbers by counting. You have to introduce more axioms, such as closure under the subtraction and square root operations, or geometric axioms, or plain numbery notions like Dedekind cuts to go beyond counting numbers.
No you can't understand the world by counting, even elaborate forms of counting. It'd be more accurate to say we understand our world by symbolizing. Bertrand Russel went down the path of reducing all mathematics to symbolic logic than any mortal had an business going. By the way 1 + 1 does not always equal 2, even in this universe; it may, for example, equal 1 under the rules of Boolean algebra. Different rules, different results, different applications.
Now I don't know what counts as "profound", but one wonders about the fact that we formulate our understanding of the universe in terms of mathematics. Insofar as the universe can be counted on to be explicable, it has to be limited, and so we can choose various kinds of mathematics (or symbolic postulates) to represent those limitation conveniently. But mathematics isn't limited by physical possibilty. 1 pound plus 1 pound equals 2 pounds; 1 (true) + 1 (true) can equal 1 if we choose a different set of postulates.
But is this a two way street? Is there something about the universe that can't be captured by mathematics? I'd be tempted to conjecture that this is a meaningless question, except these folks seem to have devised a kind of oracle that tells something about the decidability of a mathematical proposition.
So, OK smarty pants researchers, how does it work? Can we, in principle, model the process by which it does this? If not, we've found a place where the operation of the universe transcends our ability to understand it by symbolizing. Maybe that's not "profound" but it's ... intriguing.
Well, sure. Students should be able to write a bit of code, but why should software engineering be different from any other engineering?
When you get out of school with a freshly minted degree, you ought to have some knowledge of how bridges are built. Bridges are the civil engineers fetish objects, after all. But nobody trusts you to design one. About the only thing they'll trust you to do is to calculate how much paint will be needed to paint the lines on the roadway. If you don't screw that up, maybe they'll let you calculate how much paint goes on the bridge itself. Succeed there and they'll let you check somebody else's calculations.
This is not to say students shouldn't learn programming. They should, but we should be mindful of diminishing returns and the uniqueness of this opportunity in their careers. If you are programming for your career, you are constantly getting better at the craft, but when will you become better at the theory? You are bounded by the things you have done and thoughts you have had, and perhaps you can push those boundaries back, but not as much as the whole scope of human thought on the subject.
I dunno. The world doesn't "need" people arguing over anything. It needs certain side effects of argumentation.
Anyway, nobody I know believes that P=NP. If it were proven, then it certainly would be a highly practical result.
If it turns out that PNP, that is also very practical. Assuming that (as most people do) means that we have a mathematical test for feasibility. This is practically unique in engineering. In civil engineering, a bridge with a span of a hundred feet is obviously feasible, and a bridge with a span of a thousand miles is almost certainly unfeasible, but nobody can say where the dividing line comes, the point where introducing new materials, clever truss designs, and shear overbuilding cannot stretch the span another centimeter.
In fact, in engineering when you run into something remotely like that, it's not considered engineering; it's physics. A mechanical engineer will look at a contraption and decide it is impractical because it violates the laws of thermodynamics. Exactly why the thermodynamics are as they are is a profound question which doesn't very much concern the engineer, but they were well established empirically long before theoretical physics was ready to even speculate. P NP is analogous, in that the evidence for it is empirical and as solid as empirical evidence can be. It just ought to be provable or disprovable mathematically, as it'd be nice to formulate thermodynamics in terms of a more fundamental theory.
In any case, having been in the business for a long time, the line between software engineering and theoretical computer science is twisty and dynamic. The rise of Internet businesses gave software engineering a serious kick in the pants, both in terms of construction techniques, but also in terms of algorithmic design. Google is a company founded on special expertise in algorithms. Amazon and Netflix are companies that make considerable use of algorithms for marketing purposes; this may not be as precise as we'd like it to be, but as in Asimov's psychohistory, it's the statistically aggregated results that count.
The stock market dropped dramatically on the "news". Except the news is just the aggregation of other news. There wasn't any new facts in hand.
The whole idea of the Efficient Market Theory is that the market integrates all the facts and arrives at a rationally optimal price. It should not be possible to affect prices without introducing new facts.
The NBER uses different criteria than the "two quarter rule". After all it's just a made-up term. Back in the day what we are experienced was called by the wonderfully descriptive term "panic". "Depression" was a word that was less scary ... until the Great Depression changed that forever. So "recession" is the polite term.
I think the definition you choose really depends on what you intend to use it for. It's for knowing when to break the glass on the box containing the contingency plans for use "in case of recession". The "two quarter" rule means that you can't even say whether you're in a recession until you've reached six months. In that case most recessions are essentially over. Still, this probably works well for business planning, where plans don't get updated more than quarterly, and a one quarter decline is too short to read much into.
At the other end of the scale, I doubt the word "recession" appears in the Fed's model at all. It's too imprecise for their purposes, and they'd like to avoid recessions, at least ones caused by money supply issues, which you can't do when you have to wait six months before you react.
Well, what about Sim City?
I never got into FPS games, but I did at one point have a serious Sim City habit. The point of a game is to get you into a kind of "flow state"; so any game with a dynamically evolving situation that requires just the right amount of attention can do the job. Sim City worked because the city starts out growing, and once it gets to the size where expansion isn't rewarding anymore there's always a problem cropping up some place.
It seems to me that humanitarian relief is something that could be simulated in a game. Many great games, computer or otherwise, are about resource management. Do you put your resources into feeding a population in place? Or do you build refugee camps? Refugee camps centralize a lot of logistical problems, but by doing so increase dislocation, and can present persistent, long term security and development problems.
Like any other simulation game, the devil is in the details. To be playable a game has to realistic enough to be convincing and interesting, but not so realistic it is impossible to play.
Now I'll go out on a limb here and conjecture that most of the time, when people advocate the genocide of a group, they don't intend to give the group in question a say in the matter.
As a fan of math, I don't accept your logic. This would make everybody who has an opinion of their future behavior liars, whether or not that opinion was correct.
In any case, didn't I in effect say that liberals are often hypocrites? So are conservatives. Most people are hypocrites. Of the non-hypocrites, most of them are nut cases who throw the baby of common sense out with the bathwater of inconsistency. Very few people sincerely live their principles, and nobody manages it perfectly.
I don't buy the slippery slope argument. Of course, the real line between hate speech and other speech is fuzzy, and any line you draw is somewhat arbitrary.
But this is true of all restrictions on speech, for example the ones that say you can't blare your opinions over a loudspeaker at 3am in a residential neighborhood, or those that say you can't publish details of troop movements during war time. In these cases restrictions are supposed to be narrowly tailored to meet an overwhelming and legitimate government purpose. However, they still involve drawing sharp lines through fuzzy borders. If a slippery slope is what we fear, then drawing the lines conservatively should suffice. The law draws sharp lines in fuzzy territories all the time, as in the extent of trademark rights, or when you can cross your neighbor's property. If it didn't, it would have little practical use.
No. I think the problem with hate speech laws is that such laws cannot in most cases meet the needs they are supposed to serve at all. You can't stop people from hating and spreading hate, or from being stupid and spreading stupidity. Since that is what hate speech laws are supposed to do, they can't meet the narrow tailoring standard. In certain, temporary situations exceptions might apply, such as during the de-Nazification of Germany. However that's in a situation with a narrow scope in time and topic.
A good rule of thumb is that any restriction on speech is unlikely to accomplish its purpose is more likely to do mischief.
The problem with the "clear and present danger" standard is that "danger" is in the eye of the beholder.
If the government is taking an action, say going to war, for the benefit of the people, then opposing that action can be seen as endangering the country. In the run up to the 2004 election, there was considerable opinion to the effect that talk against the war put the troops in danger. Justice Holmes fell into this bit of confusion himself: the "danger" being that opposition to the draft would deny the benefits intended by the government in instating a draft.
Such a standard is not consistent with a free society in which the merits and disadvantages of government policies can be debated vigorously. The "imminent lawless action" is a much more precise way to deal with what Justice Holmes' was getting at. "Imminent" means faster than an officer of the law could react. Thus you can advocate rioting as a form of political expression, you just can't goad an unruly crowd into rioting because the police would not be able to protect the public safety.
The "Fire in a crowded theater" quote is from Oliver W. Holmes opinion in Shrenck v. United States, which held that the government could outlaw the distribution of pamphlets criticizing the draft during war time. This opinion was also the source of another favorite right wing phrase, the "clear and present danger".
The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
The "fire in a theater" and "clear and present danger" have been the touchstones for the right wing when it comes to suppressing what they consider unpatriotic speech. Lately these more erudite phrases have fallen into disfavor, in favor of a simpler epithet: traitor.
Holmes' extreme position was later moderated by Brandenberg v. Ohio, in which the court held that only incitement to immediate illegal action could be barred. This represents the current position of most liberals in the US with respect to "hate speech": that only incitement should be made publicly illegal. WIthin private institutions, different standards and values apply.
In any case, note that our right wing victim is playing bait and switch with us here. There are no "hate speech" laws in the United States for him to be victimized by. He's also confusing the situation Canada, particularly the distinction between national hate speech laws and regional tribunals. The tribunals have indeed stepped over the reasonability line in some cases, although it is a bit paranoid to call them " kangaroo courts to suppress free speech and the free exchange of ideas".
Advocating genocide or hatred against a group is not exactly the "free exchange of ideas"; I wouldn't dignify bigotry with the name. It's just that you can't outlaw stupidity, you can only drive it underground. It is not the utility of bigotry that must be preserved, but its visibility.
In that, Brandenberg may have got it right. If you expect, as a direct consequence of your speech, that others will commit a crime, you may well be a participant in that crime. If you get up in front of an angry mob and say, "So and so at 123 Maple Street is a black man who raped white girls," knowing full well that the result will be a lynch mob, that is not about expressing ideas, it's about seeing that somebody gets lynched without getting your fingerprints on it.
Yes. But we don't have our own network that feeds us back our viewpoint all day long. We scarcely have any print media left for that matter. It's not a profitable viewpoint.
I suppose MSNBC might be a counter example of somebody trying to grab a distinct market segment off of Fox, and there is some legitimacy to that. But after all they took Olbermann and Matthews off their live event anchoring because they'd be perceived as biased. I think that was a good decision, but it is not something Fox would ever do.
And that's one fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative. A liberal values, at least in principle, contrary viewpoints. Naturally, we don't live our principles any more consistently than conservatives do, but those principles are, in fact, different when it comes to the value of expanding one's world view.
Well, you'd be a fool to buy MS SQL for its enterprise capabilities.
It has its strengths, of course, but it's most important strength is it is the default database slice of the Microsoft deployment stack and is well integrated with Microsoft development tools. For modest projects it provides the kinds of advantages MySQL does in the LAMP stack.
I'm not saying it is a bad product, depending on your needs. Nor am I saying that you can't do "enterprise applications" (whatever those are) if you design around its limitations. I'm just saying that if I weren't developing around a completely Microsoft based solution, I wouldn't give MS SQL a second glance. There are cheaper (open source) solutions on the low end, and more scalable solutions on the high end.
If maximum upward scalability from a PC host starting point was required, I'd go with Oracle. The fit on the low end is a bit awkward, but it's workable. You've got to be careful when you license Oracle because you can spend too much money very easily, but if you know what you're doing Oracle is scalable and cost-efficient. If you don't know what you're doing, that's a different affair altogether.
Yes, but Snow's famous map was really an innovative use of an existing technique: mapping. In fact, Snow's map, while effective, is quite crude. Water borne illness of the era is a special case: in most public health applications such a crude map of mortality is not usually so effective, because infection carriers tend to be mobile.
Nightingale's "Coxcomb" diagram is quite interesting. In effect it is a twelve month bar graph wrapped around in a circle, and scaled by proportional area rather than radius. I don't particularly like the way she applied it to a single year, but it might be an interesting way to aggregate seasonal data across years.
Maps of instances and time series graphs are, of course, useful. But they simplistic and unreliable. It's not proof of anything that clusters "jump out" at you; not unless you can control for things like population. Again, they're worth doing, but the kind of success Snow had was a special case.
As it happens, I recently hacked progress bars into a mobile application for transferring data over potentially low bandwidth channels.
In an object oriented situation, you create an "Observable" interface which other object classes can use, achieving a neat separation between the visual effect and the underlying task.
Something similar can be done by having a special "cp" command line switch that outputs parseable progress data to stderr, but such an approach, while getting the job done, is less flexible. You can't interact with you "cp" instance, demanding more or less detail, or different kinds of detail, unless you provide some kind of input (presuming you aren't doing "cp - ..."). Once you go down that route, you really ought to standardize ALL commands, which really is a pain in the ass, and won't work in every case (e.g., copying from stdin leaves that unavailable for communicating with your program instance). Whether or not you are semantically using object orientation, you are in fact making all command line utilities a subclass of some kind of complex and poorly defined "command line utility" class.
From my design perspective, "cp" is a user interface. It also happens to be a utility, it's just that both aspects of this are wrapped up into a single piece of software. That's a lot like how people working earlier on the mobile project I spoke of had treated progress bars; the interface is tied directly to the code which does the work. I'm not religiously opposed to this, but unless it's a huge amount of work for some reason, I prefer to break things up.
Since copying can take anything from negligible to a very, very long time, and copying is a very common kind of operation, it'd make sense to create a copier class so that the state and policies of objects in that class can be altered dynamically over the course of their operation. Then I'd make the command line "cp" utility a front end for creating and invoking that object, and handling error and status output. It wouldn't need to give you access to every capability of the copy object, just enough to do the job, which simplifies testing.
The truth is that it's not really all that onerous to build software this way. The only reason not to is because we have all this code that's already been built another way. And like I said, that's fine. It's proven code and gets the job done. But at some time you have to look at the complexity of a monolithic utility and ask whether adding to it is the right way.
Count me as neither one of the faithful, nor one of the satanists. Of the two sides, neither is free of "religious zeal". Witness, as it were, the choice of prophets here; Dr. Plimer's opinion is treated as authoritative even though he is outside the mainstream of scientific opinion on this. This doesn't mean he is wrong, of course, but it doesn't mean his opinions are more credible than those of the IPCC, for example.
Unless you really, really want to believe them.
The fault isn't the tool, the fault is education.
I can hardly count the number of managers I've met who've claimed to be "visual thinkers". Without denying such a thing might exist, I've seldom seen any evidence of outstanding "visual reasoning" from such people.
For example, I often use diagrams as an adjunct to my reasoning, and find that "visual thinkers" often have strong opinions about the aesthetic aspects of these diagrams. Seldom is the opinion about things in the diagram that carry semantic information: spatial, thematic or topological relationships for example. Furthermore, their aesthetic contributions aren't very aesthetically sophisticated, demonstrating of bad typography choices, cluttered compositions, insensitivity to color complementarity and value.
I call their claims into doubt because I have known unusual individuals who could be described as visual thinkers. One was an architect who was nearly incomprehensible without a pencil in his hand, but wonderfully eloquent with one. None of these people ever claimed to be "visual thinkers", as if that were a loftier kind of cognition. I suspect that's because it is not how a "visual thinker" would conceive of or express the distinction between themselves and "normal".
It is my opinion that the popularity of claiming to be a "visual thinker" stems from "visual reasoning" not being part of most people's education. An opinion justified as "visual thinking" is therefore unlikely to meet an informed challenge. Put most "visual thinkers" in front of a panel of artists or architects, and they will be reluctant to claim that label for themselves.
I happen to think that computer based presentations are very useful communications tools, but you really have to start by having something worth saying.