How can it be that after 60+ years of language development, errors are handled by only two comparatively verbose and crude options, return values or exceptions?
Of course, it could be that this just means that your own language horizons are too narrow. Prolog and icon come to mind.
I think I'm officially a geezer (past 60) and I'm spending Saturday afternoon in the lab taking notes on a 10" Galaxy Note, and while theDUT temperature stabilizes I'm catching Lagrange and checking/. All that said, I still ease my old eyes by killing trees for large schematics. Don't knock 300 dpi on 22"x17"
Nice try, but wrong. CS is admittedly not about project management etc. (although SE is often either part of the curriculum or an elective) but software engineering, as formally defined, is all about management of software projects to get predictable quality results.
And, yes, I've been involved with both at the formal academic level.
Well, it's nice to see silicon winning back some ground from the Carbon Assault. The question is whether its new future in power systems makes up for losing its long-time prominence in microelectronics or whether batteries are just a consolation prize.
Any tips for those of us looking to instigate culture change and promote healthy work-life balance?
You won't change the system from the outside. Therefore you must subvert it:
Accept the advice: work 110 hours a week for four or more years.
Publish more papers than you use in the toilets.
Graduate with a PhD that will get you a killer postdoc
Now that you have a postdoc, work 120 hours a week and publish even more papers. Study the methods of your PI so that someday you can supplant him!
Find your next postdoc. Crank it up to 130 hours a week.
Aha! You get a tenure-track appointment. And you're only 42 years old!
In order to make tenure, you need your grad students and postdocs to generate trainloads of papers. You, of course, must spend your time on applying for grants.
Crank up the schedule to 140 hours a week. And don't let those slacker grad students and postdocs get away with only 80 hours a week, because that would sabotage your plan to subvert the system.
You made tenure! And before your 50th birthday, too, if only by a few months.
Associate professors don't have enough power, though, to subvert the system. Crank up the hours to 150 a week. And don't let your grad students, postdocs, or collaborators get away with anything.
Full Professor! Now you are finally in position to accomplish your true objective!
Write a memo to those aspiring to follow in your footsteps, explaining how the secret to success is to never slack off by working only 100 hours a week.
And third, we keep going back to IBM/Lenovo because we rarely have issues with them. To borrow a phrase, they just work.
I've owned an HP (more than ten years ago), a T42 Thinkpad from the time that Lenovo was taking over, and a new T520. The HP was OK, if a bit fragile. The T42, as you say, just plain works. Damn near bulletproof, never a problem -- and it's been in heavy use for seven years.
The kindest thing I can say about the T520 is that it's flaky. Cores randomly, sometimes before it's done POSTing. The wireless networking is up and down, up and down -- unless it's just plain down. It's the kind of intermittent behavior that you can't get warranty service for because it never reproduces when the technician tests it.
I bought the T42 because I knew literally hundreds of engineers from semiconductor companies who put hundreds of thousands of miles on theirs every year and they did, indeed, just plain work. And that's just what it did for me until it got too long in the tooth to handle the current workload. But if I could get a halfway modern laptop with the quality of that T42, I'd scrap this Lenovo POS for it in a hartbeat.
I do agree that copyright terms are ludicrous at the moment, and really only a cash grap by the likes of Disney, but the power to create and spread that creation is rapidly moving away from large companies and into the hands of individuals.
Just as the power to create software moved from large companies into the hands of individuals.
Of course this isn't news to us. The news is that someone in the legal community got the memo.
And not just anyone. RIchard Posner is the most-cited appellate judge in the USA. He's incredibly influential, and most of all on topics relating to law and the economy. To give you an idea, he has almost single-handedly convinced the antitrust bar that there is no such thing as monopoly power, statutes to the contrary, and is spearheading a movement within the legal community to "revise" antitrust law to something closer to what the railroad barons would have recognized.
So, yeah, we can feel smug. But we should also be very glad that this particular pebble is starting to move.
Modest props to David Weber, who introduced carriers (for fairly good reasons, mostly having to do with life support and cost) to his Honorverse.
And then, as he spent more time working out the actual dynamics of combat in his universe, rapidly reduced their combat utility, shifted their mission roles, and generally de-emphasized them from their projected value.
Say what you will about MS, but I've *never*, in 20 years, seen an ad in a MS product that was from Microsoft.
You mean, aside from cross-advertising? (E.g. nagging Office users about the wonders of Sharepoint.)
No, the MS operating system business works differently: MS has a honking ginormous captive user base. OEMs can't survive without access to that user base, thus they have to buy access to it from Microsoft. MS sells users (that means you!) to the OEMs. So you don't pay for the operating system, but are instead the "product" that MS sells to others.
Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.
This has very obviously been Microsoft's business model for operating systems from the very beginning: they don't sell the OS to you, they sell you to the OEMs.
You can't buy what you want without government permission, corporations can't sell what they want without government permission, and they can't even *speak* about their products without government permission.
Yessir, that's one "free" market.
The ones I'm familiar with are Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Perhaps you could enlighten me on the one you're describing.
summer holds a special place in our hearts:blistering afternoons, camping in front of the TV, sweltering evenings gazing at the calendar
... waiting for October to finally arrive and bring with it daytime temperatures below 40C and the hope that before long (November, perhaps) we can actually go outdoors in something other than a mad dash to reach air conditioning again. Then, before we knew it, April arrived and it was back into our shelters.
Not just ugly. Varicose veins divert returning blood to recirculate and pool in the lower legs. Consequences can include blood clots, edema, and (in my case) tissue necrosis leading to ruptured Achilles tendons.
... and they didn't come from working standing up.
However, using a stepper to work the leg muscles will reverse the effect: increase deep veinous circulation to better than sitting. Best of all, use compression stockings to force blood up out of the legs -- whether you work sitting or standing.
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How can it be that after 60+ years of language development, errors are handled by only two comparatively verbose and crude options, return values or exceptions?
Of course, it could be that this just means that your own language horizons are too narrow. Prolog and icon come to mind.
I think I'm officially a geezer (past 60) and I'm spending Saturday afternoon in the lab taking notes on a 10" Galaxy Note, and while theDUT temperature stabilizes I'm catching Lagrange and checking /. All that said, I still ease my old eyes by killing trees for large schematics. Don't knock 300 dpi on 22"x17"
Neither one is their job.
Nice try, but wrong. CS is admittedly not about project management etc. (although SE is often either part of the curriculum or an elective) but software engineering, as formally defined, is all about management of software projects to get predictable quality results.
And, yes, I've been involved with both at the formal academic level.
Well, it's nice to see silicon winning back some ground from the Carbon Assault. The question is whether its new future in power systems makes up for losing its long-time prominence in microelectronics or whether batteries are just a consolation prize.
maybe a new Star Wars film would be watchable.
Well, we could hope that there's something like the Star Trek odd/even rule, except three at a time.
I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me
... and despite giving it my best try three times in a row, it just might.
Or at least it's highly specific as long as the virus replicates itself perfectly, even for nonessential DNA.
It's a good thing that viruses never mutate, isn't it?
Any tips for those of us looking to instigate culture change and promote healthy work-life balance?
You won't change the system from the outside. Therefore you must subvert it:
And third, we keep going back to IBM/Lenovo because we rarely have issues with them. To borrow a phrase, they just work.
I've owned an HP (more than ten years ago), a T42 Thinkpad from the time that Lenovo was taking over, and a new T520. The HP was OK, if a bit fragile. The T42, as you say, just plain works. Damn near bulletproof, never a problem -- and it's been in heavy use for seven years.
The kindest thing I can say about the T520 is that it's flaky. Cores randomly, sometimes before it's done POSTing. The wireless networking is up and down, up and down -- unless it's just plain down. It's the kind of intermittent behavior that you can't get warranty service for because it never reproduces when the technician tests it.
I bought the T42 because I knew literally hundreds of engineers from semiconductor companies who put hundreds of thousands of miles on theirs every year and they did, indeed, just plain work. And that's just what it did for me until it got too long in the tooth to handle the current workload. But if I could get a halfway modern laptop with the quality of that T42, I'd scrap this Lenovo POS for it in a hartbeat.
Or is that redundant?
Every time I upgrade my graphics card, all of my games stop working.
I'm sure that there's something wrong with this, but I can't put my finger on it.
I do agree that copyright terms are ludicrous at the moment, and really only a cash grap by the likes of Disney, but the power to create and spread that creation is rapidly moving away from large companies and into the hands of individuals.
Just as the power to create software moved from large companies into the hands of individuals.
Of course this isn't news to us. The news is that someone in the legal community got the memo.
And not just anyone. RIchard Posner is the most-cited appellate judge in the USA. He's incredibly influential, and most of all on topics relating to law and the economy. To give you an idea, he has almost single-handedly convinced the antitrust bar that there is no such thing as monopoly power, statutes to the contrary, and is spearheading a movement within the legal community to "revise" antitrust law to something closer to what the railroad barons would have recognized.
So, yeah, we can feel smug. But we should also be very glad that this particular pebble is starting to move.
Modest props to David Weber, who introduced carriers (for fairly good reasons, mostly having to do with life support and cost) to his Honorverse.
And then, as he spent more time working out the actual dynamics of combat in his universe, rapidly reduced their combat utility, shifted their mission roles, and generally de-emphasized them from their projected value.
Say what you will about MS, but I've *never*, in 20 years, seen an ad in a MS product that was from Microsoft.
You mean, aside from cross-advertising? (E.g. nagging Office users about the wonders of Sharepoint.)
No, the MS operating system business works differently: MS has a honking ginormous captive user base. OEMs can't survive without access to that user base, thus they have to buy access to it from Microsoft. MS sells users (that means you!) to the OEMs. So you don't pay for the operating system, but are instead the "product" that MS sells to others.
Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.
This has very obviously been Microsoft's business model for operating systems from the very beginning: they don't sell the OS to you, they sell you to the OEMs.
You can't buy what you want without government permission, corporations can't sell what they want without government permission, and they can't even *speak* about their products without government permission.
Yessir, that's one "free" market.
The ones I'm familiar with are Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Perhaps you could enlighten me on the one you're describing.
summer holds a special place in our hearts:blistering afternoons, camping in front of the TV, sweltering evenings gazing at the calendar
... waiting for October to finally arrive and bring with it daytime temperatures below 40C and the hope that before long (November, perhaps) we can actually go outdoors in something other than a mad dash to reach air conditioning again. Then, before we knew it, April arrived and it was back into our shelters.
Just like probable cause, habeas corpus, due process, etc. They all go out the window when the Administration cites the State Secrets Privilege.
There's a reason I don't drink water in Nawlins. And, Bill Fields to the contrary, it has nothing to do with fish.
Bad enough that they're sending out treated wastewater for drinking, now we're going to have sewer electricity?
I wouldn't count on much of anything more substantive than renaming post offices to get through Congress for the foreseeable future.
I am choosing to live with ugly veins.
Not just ugly. Varicose veins divert returning blood to recirculate and pool in the lower legs. Consequences can include blood clots, edema, and (in my case) tissue necrosis leading to ruptured Achilles tendons.
... and they didn't come from working standing up.
However, using a stepper to work the leg muscles will reverse the effect: increase deep veinous circulation to better than sitting. Best of all, use compression stockings to force blood up out of the legs -- whether you work sitting or standing.
That means that we can use bombs to nudge its orbit without the damned thing falling apart into a bunch of planetary buckshot.