Re:Editorial Oversight != Truth (i.e. FOX News)
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 3, Informative
Those links do indeed provide more information about the conflict and the initial trial itself. They say nothing about the appeal, which overturned the initial ruling. In that appeal, as I shamelessly copied and pasted earlier, Fox argued that broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports. The reasoning of course was that truth-telling is an FCC policy, not a law. Curious though how this "guideline" is deemed unenforceable and yet saying "fuck" or "shit" on the radio could potentially net you a fine of $30,000 per offense. (I volunteer at a radio station.)
From one of your linked articles:
The First Amendment dictates that the news media should regulate themselves. The judicial, legislative and executive branches must keep out of it.
Really? So newspapers should be allowed to commit libel with impunity? What about plagiarism? No? But who enforces those laws? It couldn't be the government, could it? The media has never effectively policed itself, at least not recently. If it were solely up to broadcasters, they would probably replace the news with game shows since game shows have better ratings and ad revenue by far. You think it's by accident that every major broadcaster has a news program? No, they are required to have one through terms with Congress and the FCC.
Who gave Fox and the other broadcasters those airwaves for pennies on the dollar in the first place, those public airwaves? The government. Why did the government originally give broadcasters this bandwidth allocation on the cheap? So that they would maintain certain standards, provide education, and news on current events. I'm not asking that government okay everything before it can be published. Quite the contrary. However, I am also quite certain that if a news organization using my public airwaves makes a conscious decision to distort, I want that news editor's head on a pike. There's a difference between a mistake and a lie. I see no reason why it shouldn't apply to the New York Times just as much as the New York Post, or Fox as much as CBS. It's not about liberal vs. conservative. It's about public trust.
Do you remember GI Joe and He-Man? Remember how cartoons like them had "educational" segments in the last few minutes of every show? The reason is because broadcasters are legally required to have certain minimum amounts of educational content. GI Joe and He-Man as they originally existed had absolutely no educational or socially redeeming value whatsoever. Therefore (rather than rework the shows to be better) segments were pasted on at the end telling kids not to talk to strangers and not to go swimming after a thunderstorm.
You want government out of TV broadcasting? Fine. Tell them to give back the airwaves, and we'll call it even.
Re:Editorial Oversight != Truth (i.e. FOX News)
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 3, Informative
Jane Akre and her husband Steve Wilson are former employees of FOX owned-and-operated station WTVT in Tampa, Florida. In 1997 they refused to work on their story (about Monsanto's use of BGH) after FOX tried to force them to include knowingly false information. They successfully sued under Florida's whistle blower law and were awarded a $425,000 settlement. However, FOX appealed and won, after the court declared that FCC policy against falsification that FOX violated was just a policy and not a "law, rule, or regulation", and so the whistle blower law did not apply.
FOX did not dispute that it tried to force Akre to broadcast a false story, but argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports.
In 2004 FOX countersued Akre and Wilson for trial fees and costs.
Was this one case the worst possible thing that could happen? Of course not. But doesn't it give you pause that the First Amendment was used as a public justification to lie or deliberately distort news reports? On how many other stories did they exercise this right?
This and other technologies have found their way into Java 1.6. The implementation details are being dealt with. So what's your beef now?
To answer with your own quote: "Yes it is theoretically possible. And yet no one has done it. Stop talking about hypotheticals. We're talking about code that exists today, not in your wild imaginations." But I do agree the problems the JVM has aren't inherent to VMs in general. For example, OCaml's VM doesn't have these problems.
Is that Java compiled with gcj? With javac? Is it C compiled with gcc? Visual C++? Intel C compiler? egcs? Digital Mars? One language can't be "faster" than another. Only one compiler produces faster executables than another.
If you are compiling to bytecodes (*.class files), the "compiler" doesn't matter much. If you are comparing the runtimes of JVMs, which produce the binary executable ostensibly after the program starts, then we can talk. As for comparing GCJ's direct compilation to Sun Hotspot engine, GCJ loses almost every time and usually by a noticeable margin. GCJ at this point should be seen for its convenience in packaging, not its raw speed. (I still like GCJ, but let us call a spade a spade.)
If that seems counter-intuitive, consider that java compiles into machine code (at run time) that is run time-optimized.
For instance, if it notices that it's frequently calling a series of functions with a certain set of values and those functions don't change state, it could calculate the return and skip calling the function altogether.
Does it? What if the state of the object can affect the return value?
Often times, the granularity of the JVM in this case is not at the object level, but at the field level. This is a common misconception. What you see as an object at the code level is not necessarily how it's handled inside the JVM.
Although that may not be an exact representation of what's going on, some of the optimizations are much more tricky, and they are across the board.
Oh, no, I guess it doesn't actually do that. I think you meant to say "I pulled that example out of my ass, but Sun's JVM does some optimization at run-time."
No, he's right. Just because someone isn't a JVM developer doesn't mean that his points are made up.
Bullshit. Assembly language, almost by definition, can do anything that a program on a particular architecture can do. If it can't be done in assembly language, it can't be done.
From a pure math point of view you are correct. In the real world you're quite wrong. Except maybe (MAYBE!) for the top assembly coders in the world, a non-trivial application will be faster written in C than assembly. Not only will the assembly language version take orders of magnitude longer to write than a C version, humans make mistakes. While one or twenty particular sections will be optimized ahead of the equivalent C version -- commonly through the exploitation of side effects -- what about ten or twenty thousand code segments? A C compiler will do a damn fine job and as good a job with the hundred thousandth code segment as it does with the second. That's the gain. The same is becoming (has become?) true of Java when compared to C.
However, in a relatively small corner case, the grandparent post was absolutely right, even in a pure math sense. How? The JVM can detect what kind of processor you have at runtime. It can generate optimized code for a Pentium IV rather than the generic 486 or Pentium instructions commonly found in C or assembly builds. Assembly cannot dynamically adjust itself for the platform you are on. It cannot do runtime clock timings to determing optimal ordering. In short, assembly cannot make assumptions. Assembly must definitely KNOW that you have hardware X and it will only ever run on hardware X or hardware that emulates/extends it.
So yes, anything you do in a JVM can be done in assembly. However I am not aware of any non-trivial assembly projects that are completely rewritten to run faster on newer Athlon processors and completely rewritten again to run faster on Intel Xeons.
What do you think Sun's java binary is written in? It's C (or C++, I'm too lazy to check). If Sun can write a program in C that implements those optimizations, then it's possible to write a C program that perform
Curious, isn't it? The expected conjugation of the verb to be for the pronoun I is "am," correct? The negative would be "I am not." Therefore how did "aren't I" come into common practice? The closest example of a negative contraction for "am not" is not "aren't," but rather the much-maligned "ain't."
As it turns out, ain't was used at one time in upper class (posh) British speech from the 19th century.
This assumes that "your uncle" is unambiguous, for example if he is with you and your friends. The use of commas here would be for the purpose of restatement. In this case "your uncle" and "Jack" are restatements of the same noun. This is perfectly acceptable grammar.
In addition, the following is correct as well.
"Go help your uncle Jack off the horse."
Here, rather than a restatement, we have greater specificity. If we know (or can assume) that this person has more than one uncle, we should specify that "uncle Jack" is the uncle of focus. On the other hand, now that I think of it, both words could be capitalized as "Uncle Jack" could be considered a complete proper noun in the latter case.
Other possibilities include the following:
"Go! Help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
"Go, help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
"Go help your uncle Jack. Off the horse."
"Go help your uncle. Jack off the horse."
"Go help your uncle. Jack, off the horse!"
And on and on. It is a shame that many rely on italics, bold, all capital letters, and emoticons to convey thoughts when a comma or an exclamation point (just one!) would suffice.
It is perhaps an equal shame when others attempt to correct punctuation mistakes that aren't there.
These sort of bugs are generally indicitave of architectural flaws and broken development processes. What needs to be done, right from the start of a project, is constant performance measurement and memory footprint measurements. And when things start going bad, you *stop* feature work right away and fix the problems. Before they become too hard to fix.
Okay hotshot, name ONE project you've worked on that has the complexity and wide audience of a web browser? This example you give must incorporate a complex UI (not in terms of use, but necessary complexity on the back end), advanced embedded scripting, render quickly, and yet not ignore security concerns.
Methinks you have no project in your resume that even comes close to what the Mozilla Firefox team has produced. And yet the processes you have used in your smaller scale and smaller scope projects should trump their efforts for the last six/seven years? Riiiiiiiiiight.
Agile works well for this -- every iteration should be shippable. No leaks or performance problems (or other bugs for that matter) should ever live more than two iterations, otherwise you hit the big virtual stop button and fix the damn problems before proceeding.
In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice... well... the real world works differently. I tend to regard the Linux kernel as an effective development process. The same with the Apache web server. The BSDs. Postfix. The list goes on.
NONE of them have a development model as stringent as the one you propose. Your solution works for small-scale, one-off solutions on a contract basis for one or a small set of customers. It has no relevance to the discussion at hand -- especially not for a collaborative programming effort like the popular free software and open source codebases. For most projects, release early/release often tends to work out the best -- with less emphasis on "perfect" and more on "good enough for a milestone."
If you are an architect or development manager, never accept mediocrity -- fight it with everything you have. It's the only way to create software you can take pride in and that your users will love. And the people working on the project will appreciate it too.
Yes! Just like the Amiga! Oops! That failed in the marketplace. Err... Like BeOS! Hrmm... 3DO! *sigh*
Software will cease to be mediocre when users stop accepting mediocrity. As it stands, not only does the general user not seem to be moving in this direction, s/he is still surprisingly accepting of less-than-mediocre on a regular basis. But if you want to rush the windmills, go right ahead. I'll be watching from a distance, cheering you on.
Perhaps for the same reasons that some folks use stored procedures in databases rather than sending a series of queries and responses over the wire. A highly tuned CPU and northbridge chipset combination may be able to perform functions with faster timings than a somewhat more generic OS-level version by reducing the number of roundtrips in and out of the CPU and memory subsystems.
And hardware can indeed be faster than the equivalent software. Witness the rise of the GPU. A dedicated hardware item like a GPU will run (and does run) circles around the software equivalent running on a general purpose CPU.
Never underestimate the potential of the transistor.;-)
Science is not about "truth," it is about probabilities and -- very important -- predictions. You determine the probability that something could happen and predict how it will be seen in the future. That is science, not some abstract, higher notion of "truth."
Evolution predicts that random mutation will give rise to new variations within a species and eventually a new species. This very Slashdot-linked article describes how someone reverse engineered DNA to show us the roadmap it took. How we predicted evolution occurred is being corroborated with evidence from this study.
If, on the other hand, this study found that the DNA sequence showed the opposite, a non-sequential series of steps that could only be explained by outside engineering (i.e., an intelligent designer), then a major aspect of evolution would have been demonstrated false. But it wasn't rendered false. It merely adds to the body of evidence for evolution. The data best fits the evolutionary theory given.
This is how science works: probabilities, predictions, and falsifiability. Now your turn.
How can Intelligent Design:
determine the probability of an intelligent designer? (Simply proclaiming the probability to be a certainty does not make it so.)
make a prediction based on its assertions?
be rendered falsifiable through testing?
If you cannot come up with a reasonable answer for all three of those questions, you are not talking about science; you are talking about theology and dogma.
FYI: Archaeopteryx is indeed a transitory species. We are all transitory species. There is no such thing as a "finished" species. It was only probably not in the direct lineage between dinosaurs and modern birds like previously... *cough* *cough* predicted *cough* *cough*...from its body structure. Luckily, this particular piece of evidence was falsified upon further review.
There's no way the most anal admin can lock your system down far enough that you can't even change the look of the desktop.
Actually, there is. Any and all workstation registry settings (which include your desktop) can be restricted by the domain admin. It is just by choice (and the expected cries of persecution from cranky users) that almost all admins don't lock them down.
I think most developers *should* learn about design (actually, layout is probably a more accurate description in this context, but whatever). I think Photoshop and Illustrator jockeys should take an opportunity to learn how to program (C++ or any other).
The acquisition of knowledge should never be discouraged.
On the other hand, just as a Photoshop guru should not assume that s/he knows best with regard to algorithm analysis, a programmer should not automatically assume that their strengths extend into other non-related fields. To put it bluntly, just because you know the API to GTK+ doesn't mean you are a good UI engineer.
So they went after a bar, but not the dictionaries that list the incredibly commonly used word. Why? Because the bar makes money off the word? So do dictionary companies.
The dictionary is where we go for Scrabble help. It's the definitive answer to the question, "Is that a word?" Not a group of words or made-up words -- singular items of the language. They should not be subject to trademark, especially not in a completely unrelated business sector.
Also, trademarks must be enforced if they are to be kept. Marvel and DC didn't enforce it when it showed up in the dictionary. Unless they really want to remove it from the general lexicon, they should lose this trademark. Hell, they should lose this trademark period!
Population of the US: 295,734,134 Number without any health insurance: ~45,000,000
With Canada, you speak of the difference between an MRI in a week instead of months.
With the US, it's the difference between getting an MRI or not at all. (Any stats on how long it takes on average to get an MRI in the US?)
With Canada, you bring up the anecdotal evidence of one woman with multiple sclerosis.
With the US, I bring up the statistically sound evidence that the life expectancy of the entire country of Canada per capita is higher than the US, the infant mortality rate is lower than the US, the amount of money spent per capita is less than the US, the death rate is lower than the US (even if you subtract the US's obscenely high murder rate), etc.
If Canadian healthcare is so perfect, why are private clinics poping up?
I never said that Canadian healthcare was perfect. Go back and review my post Mr. Strawman Argument.
Private clinics are popping up because people are commonly willing to shell out some extra cash -- if they have it -- when sick and usually (with justification) afraid.
Those with larger disposable incomes will always be more vocal about their right to cut in line on the basis of wealth than those below the poverty line. But rather than pooling their funds to get more physicians in the general workforce, they go for the quick fix that helps far fewer as long as the fewer includes themselves.
It's like bottled water. With all the money spent on bottled water every year, imagine what it would be like if that same money were spent managing the general water supply and enforcing clean water laws.
Canadian healthcare is far from perfect. Then again, it's like capitalism: the worst form of economic policy known to man, save all the others. US healthcare falls within the category of "one of the others."
First, conservative and liberal mean different things in Canada and Europe. To those regions, a conservative is what the US would call a liberal Democrat. A liberal is what the US would call the Green party or a socialist party.
And before you continue to slam those regions, check out what the US spends on health care versus those countries. Bear in mind that these stats are from 1991. They are worse now in most areas except paid maternity leave (unless Bush rolled back those improvements too).
We spend more and get less. Nice.
Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world's median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year--or close to four hundred billion dollars--on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy--a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper--has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.
...
The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.
It's not like C was the first language to use curly braces. Also, Perl does the exact same thing as JavaScript in that you must scope your variables ('my' as opposed to 'var') and yet people still find time to complain specifically that JavaScript is not acting enough like C. At this point, C is in the minority.
Come to think of it, there are more things different between C and JavaScript than features in common. But if it makes you feel any better, just think of "var" as JavaScript's version of C's typed variable declarations with char, int, et al.
Hell, C would probably act the same way if you didn't have to explicitly define your variables at the beginning of your functions. And yes, I know that you can define variables anywhere in the function body now, but that was over 30 years after the initial version of K&R.
Stop holding C up as a paragon of computing excellence. It was a huge step up from assembly language and faster than other "high level" languages of the time. Nowadays we have more than 16K of core memory to work with, and most of us aren't working on kernels.
And of course, TIFF is awfully inefficient when sending uncompressed. You'd be better off with PNG in my opinion.
Who uses TIFF uncompressed? Or did you mean TIFF with bitmap encoding?
Want color raster images? Use TIFF with LZW. Want photographic images? Use TIFF with JPEG.
On the other hand, if you have 300dpi black and white images, you can do a lot worse than TIFF Group 4. Comes out to 40-50k. PNG doesn't even come close in that scenario.
The moral to this story? TIFF, Tagged Image File Format, merely provides an envelope for the data. The type and level of compression is a completely separate matter, which is why your viewers were always so hit and miss. Comparing TIFF to PNG is truly apples to oranges.
C-like syntax with C avoids human misunderstanding? Tell that to all the buffer overflow exploits out there.
I know C. I know JavaScript. You know what helped me avoid human misunderstanding? Learning the languages. Everything else is personal bias and hot air.
Oh, please. JavaScript is just a horrible language, the discovery of the poorly-documented closures (how many people here knew JavaScript supposed closures?) was just the latest annoyance. JavaScript seems to be built from the ground-up to allow as many stupid errors as possible.
Let's start off with "var". WTF does "var" do?!
Dude, I figured out what "var" meant back in 1995/1996. Coincidentally, that was around the time I first learned JavaScript. Where have you been?
You might as well write about the bugs inherent with using malloc in C without ever using free (and not using a 3rd-party garbage collector). Hey look! Memory leaks! Who knew?
Everyone who ever bothered to look it up, that's who. You remind me of Perl programmers that never heard of "use strict" in their Perl scripts. "How am I supposed to know what 'my' means!?!"
Slashdot Mirror
From one of your linked articles:
Really? So newspapers should be allowed to commit libel with impunity? What about plagiarism? No? But who enforces those laws? It couldn't be the government, could it? The media has never effectively policed itself, at least not recently. If it were solely up to broadcasters, they would probably replace the news with game shows since game shows have better ratings and ad revenue by far. You think it's by accident that every major broadcaster has a news program? No, they are required to have one through terms with Congress and the FCC.
Who gave Fox and the other broadcasters those airwaves for pennies on the dollar in the first place, those public airwaves? The government. Why did the government originally give broadcasters this bandwidth allocation on the cheap? So that they would maintain certain standards, provide education, and news on current events. I'm not asking that government okay everything before it can be published. Quite the contrary. However, I am also quite certain that if a news organization using my public airwaves makes a conscious decision to distort, I want that news editor's head on a pike. There's a difference between a mistake and a lie. I see no reason why it shouldn't apply to the New York Times just as much as the New York Post, or Fox as much as CBS. It's not about liberal vs. conservative. It's about public trust.
Do you remember GI Joe and He-Man? Remember how cartoons like them had "educational" segments in the last few minutes of every show? The reason is because broadcasters are legally required to have certain minimum amounts of educational content. GI Joe and He-Man as they originally existed had absolutely no educational or socially redeeming value whatsoever. Therefore (rather than rework the shows to be better) segments were pasted on at the end telling kids not to talk to strangers and not to go swimming after a thunderstorm.
You want government out of TV broadcasting? Fine. Tell them to give back the airwaves, and we'll call it even.
Jane Akre and her husband Steve Wilson are former employees of FOX owned-and-operated station WTVT in Tampa, Florida. In 1997 they refused to work on their story (about Monsanto's use of BGH) after FOX tried to force them to include knowingly false information. They successfully sued under Florida's whistle blower law and were awarded a $425,000 settlement. However, FOX appealed and won, after the court declared that FCC policy against falsification that FOX violated was just a policy and not a "law, rule, or regulation", and so the whistle blower law did not apply.
FOX did not dispute that it tried to force Akre to broadcast a false story, but argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports.
In 2004 FOX countersued Akre and Wilson for trial fees and costs.
Was this one case the worst possible thing that could happen? Of course not. But doesn't it give you pause that the First Amendment was used as a public justification to lie or deliberately distort news reports? On how many other stories did they exercise this right?
I admit, I was... well... acting the role of the asshole at points in my post, and I apologize for my tone at times. That said, it does exist today, not in my wild imagination.
If you are compiling to bytecodes (*.class files), the "compiler" doesn't matter much. If you are comparing the runtimes of JVMs, which produce the binary executable ostensibly after the program starts, then we can talk. As for comparing GCJ's direct compilation to Sun Hotspot engine, GCJ loses almost every time and usually by a noticeable margin. GCJ at this point should be seen for its convenience in packaging, not its raw speed. (I still like GCJ, but let us call a spade a spade.)
Often times, the granularity of the JVM in this case is not at the object level, but at the field level. This is a common misconception. What you see as an object at the code level is not necessarily how it's handled inside the JVM.
No, he's right. Just because someone isn't a JVM developer doesn't mean that his points are made up.
From a pure math point of view you are correct. In the real world you're quite wrong. Except maybe (MAYBE!) for the top assembly coders in the world, a non-trivial application will be faster written in C than assembly. Not only will the assembly language version take orders of magnitude longer to write than a C version, humans make mistakes. While one or twenty particular sections will be optimized ahead of the equivalent C version -- commonly through the exploitation of side effects -- what about ten or twenty thousand code segments? A C compiler will do a damn fine job and as good a job with the hundred thousandth code segment as it does with the second. That's the gain. The same is becoming (has become?) true of Java when compared to C.
However, in a relatively small corner case, the grandparent post was absolutely right, even in a pure math sense. How? The JVM can detect what kind of processor you have at runtime. It can generate optimized code for a Pentium IV rather than the generic 486 or Pentium instructions commonly found in C or assembly builds. Assembly cannot dynamically adjust itself for the platform you are on. It cannot do runtime clock timings to determing optimal ordering. In short, assembly cannot make assumptions. Assembly must definitely KNOW that you have hardware X and it will only ever run on hardware X or hardware that emulates/extends it.
So yes, anything you do in a JVM can be done in assembly. However I am not aware of any non-trivial assembly projects that are completely rewritten to run faster on newer Athlon processors and completely rewritten again to run faster on Intel Xeons.
"This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put."
At the risk of appearing pedantic with regard to quotations.
"I'm pedantic, aren't I?"
Curious, isn't it? The expected conjugation of the verb to be for the pronoun I is "am," correct? The negative would be "I am not." Therefore how did "aren't I" come into common practice? The closest example of a negative contraction for "am not" is not "aren't," but rather the much-maligned "ain't."
As it turns out, ain't was used at one time in upper class (posh) British speech from the 19th century.
"I'm pedantic, ain't I?"
The punctuation is fine.
"Go help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
This assumes that "your uncle" is unambiguous, for example if he is with you and your friends. The use of commas here would be for the purpose of restatement. In this case "your uncle" and "Jack" are restatements of the same noun. This is perfectly acceptable grammar.
In addition, the following is correct as well.
"Go help your uncle Jack off the horse."
Here, rather than a restatement, we have greater specificity. If we know (or can assume) that this person has more than one uncle, we should specify that "uncle Jack" is the uncle of focus. On the other hand, now that I think of it, both words could be capitalized as "Uncle Jack" could be considered a complete proper noun in the latter case.
Other possibilities include the following:
"Go! Help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
"Go, help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
"Go help your uncle Jack. Off the horse."
"Go help your uncle. Jack off the horse."
"Go help your uncle. Jack, off the horse!"
And on and on. It is a shame that many rely on italics, bold, all capital letters, and emoticons to convey thoughts when a comma or an exclamation point (just one!) would suffice.
It is perhaps an equal shame when others attempt to correct punctuation mistakes that aren't there.
What best-of-breed applications have YOU made, Mr. The New Stan Price? What's that?
I thought so.
People can complain even though it's free. Example: you.
The coders do worry about losing money since the Mozilla Foundation does in fact make money.
Firefox is one of the best browsers available.
I'm sorry, did you have a point worth reading?
Methinks you have no project in your resume that even comes close to what the Mozilla Firefox team has produced. And yet the processes you have used in your smaller scale and smaller scope projects should trump their efforts for the last six/seven years? Riiiiiiiiiight.
In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice... well... the real world works differently. I tend to regard the Linux kernel as an effective development process. The same with the Apache web server. The BSDs. Postfix. The list goes on.
NONE of them have a development model as stringent as the one you propose. Your solution works for small-scale, one-off solutions on a contract basis for one or a small set of customers. It has no relevance to the discussion at hand -- especially not for a collaborative programming effort like the popular free software and open source codebases. For most projects, release early/release often tends to work out the best -- with less emphasis on "perfect" and more on "good enough for a milestone."
Yes! Just like the Amiga! Oops! That failed in the marketplace. Err... Like BeOS! Hrmm... 3DO! *sigh*
Software will cease to be mediocre when users stop accepting mediocrity. As it stands, not only does the general user not seem to be moving in this direction, s/he is still surprisingly accepting of less-than-mediocre on a regular basis. But if you want to rush the windmills, go right ahead. I'll be watching from a distance, cheering you on.
here
Perhaps for the same reasons that some folks use stored procedures in databases rather than sending a series of queries and responses over the wire. A highly tuned CPU and northbridge chipset combination may be able to perform functions with faster timings than a somewhat more generic OS-level version by reducing the number of roundtrips in and out of the CPU and memory subsystems.
;-)
And hardware can indeed be faster than the equivalent software. Witness the rise of the GPU. A dedicated hardware item like a GPU will run (and does run) circles around the software equivalent running on a general purpose CPU.
Never underestimate the potential of the transistor.
Science is not about "truth," it is about probabilities and -- very important -- predictions. You determine the probability that something could happen and predict how it will be seen in the future. That is science, not some abstract, higher notion of "truth."
Evolution predicts that random mutation will give rise to new variations within a species and eventually a new species. This very Slashdot-linked article describes how someone reverse engineered DNA to show us the roadmap it took. How we predicted evolution occurred is being corroborated with evidence from this study.
If, on the other hand, this study found that the DNA sequence showed the opposite, a non-sequential series of steps that could only be explained by outside engineering (i.e., an intelligent designer), then a major aspect of evolution would have been demonstrated false. But it wasn't rendered false. It merely adds to the body of evidence for evolution. The data best fits the evolutionary theory given.
This is how science works: probabilities, predictions, and falsifiability. Now your turn.
How can Intelligent Design:
If you cannot come up with a reasonable answer for all three of those questions, you are not talking about science; you are talking about theology and dogma.
FYI: Archaeopteryx is indeed a transitory species. We are all transitory species. There is no such thing as a "finished" species. It was only probably not in the direct lineage between dinosaurs and modern birds like previously... *cough* *cough* predicted *cough* *cough*
It's called tsearch2. It has come bundled with PostgreSQL for a while now.
O'Reilly was talking about it at a conference in 2004, but I forget when it was actally released. Version 7.3 or something I think.
If you want to see something really cool in PostgreSQL, check out PostgreSQL's GIST support.
I believe the word you were looking for was paragon, not paradigm.
FYI.
I think most developers *should* learn about design (actually, layout is probably a more accurate description in this context, but whatever). I think Photoshop and Illustrator jockeys should take an opportunity to learn how to program (C++ or any other).
The acquisition of knowledge should never be discouraged.
On the other hand, just as a Photoshop guru should not assume that s/he knows best with regard to algorithm analysis, a programmer should not automatically assume that their strengths extend into other non-related fields. To put it bluntly, just because you know the API to GTK+ doesn't mean you are a good UI engineer.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=superhero
So they went after a bar, but not the dictionaries that list the incredibly commonly used word. Why? Because the bar makes money off the word? So do dictionary companies.
The dictionary is where we go for Scrabble help. It's the definitive answer to the question, "Is that a word?" Not a group of words or made-up words -- singular items of the language. They should not be subject to trademark, especially not in a completely unrelated business sector.
Also, trademarks must be enforced if they are to be kept. Marvel and DC didn't enforce it when it showed up in the dictionary. Unless they really want to remove it from the general lexicon, they should lose this trademark. Hell, they should lose this trademark period!
Number without any health insurance: ~45,000,000
With Canada, you speak of the difference between an MRI in a week instead of months.
With the US, it's the difference between getting an MRI or not at all. (Any stats on how long it takes on average to get an MRI in the US?)
With Canada, you bring up the anecdotal evidence of one woman with multiple sclerosis.
With the US, I bring up the statistically sound evidence that the life expectancy of the entire country of Canada per capita is higher than the US, the infant mortality rate is lower than the US, the amount of money spent per capita is less than the US, the death rate is lower than the US (even if you subtract the US's obscenely high murder rate), etc.
Those with larger disposable incomes will always be more vocal about their right to cut in line on the basis of wealth than those below the poverty line. But rather than pooling their funds to get more physicians in the general workforce, they go for the quick fix that helps far fewer as long as the fewer includes themselves.
It's like bottled water. With all the money spent on bottled water every year, imagine what it would be like if that same money were spent managing the general water supply and enforcing clean water laws.
Canadian healthcare is far from perfect. Then again, it's like capitalism: the worst form of economic policy known to man, save all the others. US healthcare falls within the category of "one of the others."
I could tell you, but it'll take me a while to explain it in just one line.
http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmar k.html
And before you continue to slam those regions, check out what the US spends on health care versus those countries. Bear in mind that these stats are from 1991. They are worse now in most areas except paid maternity leave (unless Bush rolled back those improvements too).
We spend more and get less. Nice.
It's not like C was the first language to use curly braces. Also, Perl does the exact same thing as JavaScript in that you must scope your variables ('my' as opposed to 'var') and yet people still find time to complain specifically that JavaScript is not acting enough like C. At this point, C is in the minority.
Come to think of it, there are more things different between C and JavaScript than features in common. But if it makes you feel any better, just think of "var" as JavaScript's version of C's typed variable declarations with char, int, et al.
Hell, C would probably act the same way if you didn't have to explicitly define your variables at the beginning of your functions. And yes, I know that you can define variables anywhere in the function body now, but that was over 30 years after the initial version of K&R.
Stop holding C up as a paragon of computing excellence. It was a huge step up from assembly language and faster than other "high level" languages of the time. Nowadays we have more than 16K of core memory to work with, and most of us aren't working on kernels.
Want color raster images? Use TIFF with LZW. Want photographic images? Use TIFF with JPEG.
On the other hand, if you have 300dpi black and white images, you can do a lot worse than TIFF Group 4. Comes out to 40-50k. PNG doesn't even come close in that scenario.
The moral to this story? TIFF, Tagged Image File Format, merely provides an envelope for the data. The type and level of compression is a completely separate matter, which is why your viewers were always so hit and miss. Comparing TIFF to PNG is truly apples to oranges.
C-like syntax with C avoids human misunderstanding? Tell that to all the buffer overflow exploits out there.
I know C. I know JavaScript. You know what helped me avoid human misunderstanding? Learning the languages. Everything else is personal bias and hot air.
You might as well write about the bugs inherent with using malloc in C without ever using free (and not using a 3rd-party garbage collector). Hey look! Memory leaks! Who knew?
Everyone who ever bothered to look it up, that's who. You remind me of Perl programmers that never heard of "use strict" in their Perl scripts. "How am I supposed to know what 'my' means!?!"