I think he had some solid ideas hidden in his somewhat sureal articles that he wrote. But finding someone with the talent and passion to bring it back to life would be extraordinarily difficult I think.
The Ariane rocket failure was a management mistake, taking existing code and deciding to use it without further testing with different hardware having different flight parameters. Had the programmers been allowed to do their job it seems very likely the problem would have been avoided.
Bertrand Meyer was the person I remember making the biggest fuss about the whole issue. He had some good points about writing reliable software but the real problem was he didn't know enough about Ada to make sense of the official report so he mostly made a lot of incorrect statements that were rather self-serving.
Basically the lesson to be learned from the Ariane V explosion was that no progamming language can save you from really stupid managers.
Ada was always a really nice teaching language as it forces the programmer to be very specific in thinking about why and how their code is going to work. An interesting property is that the more "clever" you try and get the more verbose you have to be (casts and conversions have to be explicit). This means that if actually required they tend to get encapsulated behind a clean interface just because they are so ugly.
I agree, it took quite a while until they got to the taser. The young man in question easily could have avoided the situation. When dealing with security they are trained to not back down so once they have made a decision you no longer have any options but to obey or they will make you obey. If they don't then they aren't actually much good as security. I'm sure it could have been handled better but once it started escalating and the man in question resisted and continued to resist the end was inevitable.
Had he chosen to be taken away quietly he may have gotten his question answered since Kerry didn't seem to have a problem with it. However, physically resisting security is pretty dumb.
In Switzerland the leadership of the Church of Scientology in Geneva was convicted of several crimes such as fraud, blackmail and forgery (escroquerie, chantage, faux dans les titres). However, it is hard to prove anything about the Church itself beyond the fact that they have a lot of criminals and unscrupulous people for members.
We have reasonably accurate about information about the last 650'000 years from looking at the antarctic ice. Clearly there are natural cycles that last over centuries and just looking at the regular pattern I think it is a pretty safe assumption that we would be experiencing global warming even if we had zero impact on the climate.
However, if you look at the data the current trend is unprecedented when contrasted with the historical data on the climate. Furthermore, it correlates very well with CO2 emissions which certainly suggests that we are having an influence. Global warming is a truth and the real question is how much of it is our fault and what can/should we do about it.
Anyway, he still has the right to publish the songs, just not the unique right, this does not mean an end to money for an old song.
Ironically enough it might actually mean more money. If someone remixes or covers an old song and it gets popular that always helps sales of other works that are still under copyright.
After that Elvis song was released a couple years ago it generated a nice surge in sales mostly among people too young to be familiar with Elvis's music.
You can become experienced, you can invest a lot of time and thus get a higher experience level, you can build a large network of people to chat with... But you can't become a skilled WoW player.
Well you certainly can't become a skilled WoW player in a week. The kind of skill required to play WoW well is biased very much towards decision making rather than fast reflexes. Actually mastering the decision making required to play a particular class well requires a lot of time and experience. The early stages of the game are mostly about learing about the game and exploring the world and if you accidentally pick up some skill then that is fine but not necessary. At the latter stages of the game it becomes quite obvious that some people are far more skilled decision makers than others especially when you play in smaller groups.
Sounds like you didn't enjoy the game and had to invent some excuse to justify your opinion.
Automatic memory management is based on some kind of reachability analysis. In contrast the intuitive idea behind a memory leak is when program accumulates memory that it no longer uses. Some kinds of memory leaks that occur in languages like C++ do not occur in Java but no language can really save a programmer from himself and eliminate all memory leaks.
My understanding is that the most likely use of patents is cross licensing, then royalties and finally blocking competition. Of course, software patents may be different but there are sound economic reasons why most patents are not used to block competition.
Each of the world's five continents would have one elected representative on the committee, elected by the countries from the continent they represent.
Okay, I can understand leaving out Antarctica, but who gets to break the news to Australia that their continent has been demoted and made subservient to Asia?
I have run across this five continent idea a lot in Europe and often they consider America to be a single continent.
In a well-run shop a good PM is no where near as valuable as a dozen engineers. This might be true in a poorly-run shop where projects are managed ad-hoc. My definition of a well-run shop includes a sufficent level of process maturity that top-notch project management is not required for a succesful project.
You would see that they do not contradict the concensus that this century is warmer than the previous two centuries. They show that due to numerous errors in the data and how it was handled resulted in a much less convincing temperature profile. Notably the 20th century, while warmer than recent centuries was clearly not the warmest in the last millenium.
Basically they debunk the claim that current average temperatures are unprecedented in the last 500 years.
Abundance Destroys Capitalism. This is obvious to anyone who studied even one term of Micro. As supply increases, price falls. In the limit supply becomes infinity, price drops to zero. Doesn't matter which market or good, the price drops to zero. Period. There is no more 'market'. Capitalism as we all know and love it is obliterated.
Actually markets form around asymmetries and availability is just one possible opportunity. Just because something is available in abundance doesn't mean that its price will drop to zero. Others factors that would lead to markets are asymmetries in distribution, access, risk, ability, time, expertise, knowledge...
As an example consider water. Water, even fresh water, is extraordinarily abundant on our planet yet there is still a market. Even if we exclude places where water is scarce (asymmetry in distribution) there is still a market.
On March 18th 2003 president Bush sent a letter where he justified action against Iraq as being:
"... consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
The administration repeatedly went out of their way to make the connection between terrorists and Iraq often in a context where they mentioned 9/11. I do not find it the least bit suprising that the majority of the american public thought that Iraq was directly connected with 9/11. I also think that the administration was fully aware of this confusion and because it served the administration's goals they purposely chose not to do anything to clarify the public's misunderstanding.
Based on a lot of experience with exceptions in several languages my opinion is that exceptions that the calling operation must catch are a major design flaw.
Most of the time the calling operation can't do anthing so you just clutter it up throwing the exception to the next level. If the calling operation can do something then this means that the calling operation most likely should have anticipated and prevented the exception in the first place.
Python generators borrow from a lot of other previous work so unless the language designer said "We borrowed this from Python" then it is a bit difficult to say much about the lineage of iterators in C#. Of course I agree that it is a way-cool feature.
First off, let me state I am not a big Java fan. Basically the designers of Java took a look at the state of the art in the mid 1990's and then took a couple steps back. In my opinion there is nothing Java does that isn't done better in some other language. That said, Java is more than adequate for a very large number of tasks.
Java and C++ have similar abstraction capabilities but the difference --and this goes to the very philosophy of the two languages-- is that C++ places a lot of value in giving the programmer control while Java focuses on keeping the programmer safe. Java accomplishes this by trading some of the control programmers have over how things are accomplished for safety.
The interesting question is what is the nature of this tradeoff. Is this opposition between safety and control implicit in the problem itself, i.e. it occurs in every language the best any language designer can do is decide how much control they are willing to sacrifice for safety, or is this opposition merely an artifact of current language designs.
The point I seized on from the original poster is that a lack of safety undermines some of the gains made by better abstraction facilities. In some sense this is a contradiction in the design of C++ and is the key insight from the sentence I quoted. Clearly the orignal poster overstated several points but that does not make them wholey without merit.
C has little abstraction and little safety. Java has both abstraction and safety. C++ has abstraction without safety, a terrible combination.
This is just a doofy sentence. C has "little" safety but C++ is "without" safety? dude, learn a language before you start spouting marketing crap. If you don't know why your sentence is completely wrong, then you're not qualified to comment.
Fully encapsulating the complexity of an abstract data type without just giving up and making many of the important decisions in the language itself is an extremely difficult problem in language design. I find the first poster's sentence, while obviously an exageration, to be rather insightful.
C++ has high aspirations in terms of giving the programmer complete control but ultimately fails due to the emergent complexity that results from the inability to fully encapsulate all of the design decisions.
Part of the problem with teachers is that it is extraordinarily difficult to measure competency. There is a permanent shortage or really good people in every profession and teaching is no different.
Smart people who can't afford college can easily find the money through grants, scholarships and loans. A bigger problem is for bright to average people who can't afford college.
As a company you always have to be aware of the value you are offering your customers. My understanding is that in Germany they were upgrading in part because they were being forced by Microsoft (due to lack of support for
Windows NT)
It is not just the upfront price of Windows you need to look at but also the fact that Microsoft, due to the way they license products, essentially wants to take control of much of your IT strategy in terms of what versions of software you use and when you upgrade.
My understanding is that short term it would have been cheaper to stick with Microsoft but long term the SuSE-IBM offer was more attractive.
The ThinkPad A31p is similar to the T40p. It is heavier than the T series ThinkPads but it has a 15" screen with 1600x1200 and is a little more flexible in terms of expansion.
Any bigger than the A series Thinkpads and it becomes rather awkward to carry them. I have an A30p and really appreciate the big screen but If I were to buy a new laptop it would probably be the Thinkpad T40p. My only annoyance is that the built-in modem doesn't work under Linux but the rest of the hardware works fine.
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I think he had some solid ideas hidden in his somewhat sureal articles that he wrote. But finding someone with the talent and passion to bring it back to life would be extraordinarily difficult I think.
The Ariane rocket failure was a management mistake, taking existing code and deciding to use it without further testing with different hardware having different flight parameters. Had the programmers been allowed to do their job it seems very likely the problem would have been avoided. Bertrand Meyer was the person I remember making the biggest fuss about the whole issue. He had some good points about writing reliable software but the real problem was he didn't know enough about Ada to make sense of the official report so he mostly made a lot of incorrect statements that were rather self-serving. Basically the lesson to be learned from the Ariane V explosion was that no progamming language can save you from really stupid managers.
Ada was always a really nice teaching language as it forces the programmer to be very specific in thinking about why and how their code is going to work. An interesting property is that the more "clever" you try and get the more verbose you have to be (casts and conversions have to be explicit). This means that if actually required they tend to get encapsulated behind a clean interface just because they are so ugly.
I agree, it took quite a while until they got to the taser. The young man in question easily could have avoided the situation. When dealing with security they are trained to not back down so once they have made a decision you no longer have any options but to obey or they will make you obey. If they don't then they aren't actually much good as security. I'm sure it could have been handled better but once it started escalating and the man in question resisted and continued to resist the end was inevitable. Had he chosen to be taken away quietly he may have gotten his question answered since Kerry didn't seem to have a problem with it. However, physically resisting security is pretty dumb.
In Switzerland the leadership of the Church of Scientology in Geneva was convicted of several crimes such as fraud, blackmail and forgery (escroquerie, chantage, faux dans les titres). However, it is hard to prove anything about the Church itself beyond the fact that they have a lot of criminals and unscrupulous people for members.
However, if you look at the data the current trend is unprecedented when contrasted with the historical data on the climate. Furthermore, it correlates very well with CO2 emissions which certainly suggests that we are having an influence. Global warming is a truth and the real question is how much of it is our fault and what can/should we do about it.
Anyway, he still has the right to publish the songs, just not the unique right, this does not mean an end to money for an old song.
Ironically enough it might actually mean more money. If someone remixes or covers an old song and it gets popular that always helps sales of other works that are still under copyright. After that Elvis song was released a couple years ago it generated a nice surge in sales mostly among people too young to be familiar with Elvis's music.
Another point of view is that science and religion are philisophically related because both concern themselves with man's place in the universe.
Automatic memory management is based on some kind of reachability analysis. In contrast the intuitive idea behind a memory leak is when program accumulates memory that it no longer uses. Some kinds of memory leaks that occur in languages like C++ do not occur in Java but no language can really save a programmer from himself and eliminate all memory leaks.
My understanding is that the most likely use of patents is cross licensing, then royalties and finally blocking competition. Of course, software patents may be different but there are sound economic reasons why most patents are not used to block competition.
I have run across this five continent idea a lot in Europe and often they consider America to be a single continent.
In a well-run shop a good PM is no where near as valuable as a dozen engineers. This might be true in a poorly-run shop where projects are managed ad-hoc. My definition of a well-run shop includes a sufficent level of process maturity that top-notch project management is not required for a succesful project.
Basically they debunk the claim that current average temperatures are unprecedented in the last 500 years.
Actually markets form around asymmetries and availability is just one possible opportunity. Just because something is available in abundance doesn't mean that its price will drop to zero. Others factors that would lead to markets are asymmetries in distribution, access, risk, ability, time, expertise, knowledge ...
As an example consider water. Water, even fresh water, is extraordinarily abundant on our planet yet there is still a market. Even if we exclude places where water is scarce (asymmetry in distribution) there is still a market.
The link to the president's letter is also in an earlier post.
The administration repeatedly went out of their way to make the connection between terrorists and Iraq often in a context where they mentioned 9/11. I do not find it the least bit suprising that the majority of the american public thought that Iraq was directly connected with 9/11. I also think that the administration was fully aware of this confusion and because it served the administration's goals they purposely chose not to do anything to clarify the public's misunderstanding.
Most of the time the calling operation can't do anthing so you just clutter it up throwing the exception to the next level. If the calling operation can do something then this means that the calling operation most likely should have anticipated and prevented the exception in the first place.
Python generators borrow from a lot of other previous work so unless the language designer said "We borrowed this from Python" then it is a bit difficult to say much about the lineage of iterators in C#. Of course I agree that it is a way-cool feature.
Java and C++ have similar abstraction capabilities but the difference --and this goes to the very philosophy of the two languages-- is that C++ places a lot of value in giving the programmer control while Java focuses on keeping the programmer safe. Java accomplishes this by trading some of the control programmers have over how things are accomplished for safety.
The interesting question is what is the nature of this tradeoff. Is this opposition between safety and control implicit in the problem itself, i.e. it occurs in every language the best any language designer can do is decide how much control they are willing to sacrifice for safety, or is this opposition merely an artifact of current language designs.
The point I seized on from the original poster is that a lack of safety undermines some of the gains made by better abstraction facilities. In some sense this is a contradiction in the design of C++ and is the key insight from the sentence I quoted. Clearly the orignal poster overstated several points but that does not make them wholey without merit.
Fully encapsulating the complexity of an abstract data type without just giving up and making many of the important decisions in the language itself is an extremely difficult problem in language design. I find the first poster's sentence, while obviously an exageration, to be rather insightful.
C++ has high aspirations in terms of giving the programmer complete control but ultimately fails due to the emergent complexity that results from the inability to fully encapsulate all of the design decisions.
Part of the problem with teachers is that it is extraordinarily difficult to measure competency. There is a permanent shortage or really good people in every profession and teaching is no different.
Smart people who can't afford college can easily find the money through grants, scholarships and loans. A bigger problem is for bright to average people who can't afford college.
It is not just the upfront price of Windows you need to look at but also the fact that Microsoft, due to the way they license products, essentially wants to take control of much of your IT strategy in terms of what versions of software you use and when you upgrade.
My understanding is that short term it would have been cheaper to stick with Microsoft but long term the SuSE-IBM offer was more attractive.
Any bigger than the A series Thinkpads and it becomes rather awkward to carry them. I have an A30p and really appreciate the big screen but If I were to buy a new laptop it would probably be the Thinkpad T40p. My only annoyance is that the built-in modem doesn't work under Linux but the rest of the hardware works fine.