Vista is not perfect, but it's a *lot* nicer than NT4, 2000 for the desktop, 98, 95. Whether it's better than XP is somewhat debatable,
But that is the point: All the other major windows revs brought really significant improvements, either in terms of functionality or stability or speed (yes, one of them was in fact faster than its predecessor). Vista brings basically nothing important compared to XP.
I don't know if the upgrade myth really existed, but if it did, this does demonstrate that people and companies do not upgrade just because there is something newer out there. They will actually to some degree evaluate whether the benefits are worth the cost and inconvenience for them.
But of course, as you mention, support weighs in pretty heftily in that equation.
It's the content of the article that matters, no matter who the author;
Yes, but if the content incorporates more than facts widely known to be previously proven, and clear and verifiable logic building on those, evaluating the content is very far from trivial.
If you are unable to, or cannot be expected to, do a thorough vetting of all remaining claims in the content, then you are in reality really also being asked to _believe_ the author's claims of knowledge, and to _trust_ his judgement in handling it.
For that, reputation and past transgressions do indeed matter rather a lot.
This graph cannot be understood without additional information.
No graph can. Today we have many established idioms for graphs that provide that extra information (and that some graphs try to exploit to mislead us).
Back then all this was fairly new.
But, yeah, bars have the advantage that they work whether you read them by area or length. The disadvantage is that if you have both very small and very large values, they become hard to compare and the small ones will be hard to read. If you vary more than one dimension of each 'blob', you can express a larger range of values in an appreciable way and in in a smaller space. And the scale of the values are easier to compare visually, if you know that area is the key.
Her work was not just capable, it was revolutionary, and it is noted not because she was a woman but because it was groundbreaking in several fields central to modern civilization, largely founding one of them. It would have attracted attention in any case. And it did.
What the parent to your post quite rightly claimed was merely that such accomplishments, in that time, were it by a man, would normally bring with it not just recognition but a high position and significant power. In fact she received (mostly) only the recognition, while some of the the career paths she had clearly qualified to remained simply not open to women regardless of merit. As most loyal citizens of the time probably considered both normal and proper.
What's sad is people relying on their razor blade purchases to donate to charity and complaining when it's the wrong one.
Jeez, it's not like most medical research is funded by Gillette anyway, it's just marketing. If you really care about prostate cancer research, go and donate to that. If you for some reason want razor blades without contributing to breast cancer research, buy some different ones. And a backbone. You are not being discriminated.
Why do people still listen to the media is beyond me.
Because the ones who stop and start listening to their navels in stead invariably start spouting preposterous junk.
Media usage guidelines: 1) There is no 'the media', only lots of different channels trying to make a buck 2) The media channels are rarely the source of the information. There are actually millions of independent sources trying to get through. Some are accepted and distributed by few or many media channels. 3) The source usually has a clear agenda, which will color the information 4) The media channel usually has an agenda to make money, which will color the selection and presentation of stories. 5) The media channel may have other agendas which will color selection and presentation. 6) Your other sources of information have agendas too.
All this is normal and known to everyone. Just consider the source, consider the messenger, factor that into what you hear, see and read, and just deal with it.
Superhydrophobic surfaces and textile coverings have been around for a little while. The news here is the one-step solvent-free process, which will make industrialization a lot cheaper.
Youtube has lots on "superhydrophobic" and "nanotech fabric/textile"
Amen to that. But it's mainly a question of bad design/ignorance.
The (necessarily 3rd person) 2D levels have always been specifically designed for easy viewing from a 'static camera'. Otherwise you would hardly ever see your character. Somehow people manage to forget this aspect of level design when they move to third-person 3D.
Unless you have some amazingly awesome automatic camera controls, or are willing to spend on levels that are well-designed for well-placed static 3D cameras, you better stick to the only two easy options: static 2D cam or first person 3D.
The only thing they really have going for them are the development environments.
I'd like that to be true, but it's not. Canvas support in browsers is basically not there, so that's a pretty huge chunk of functionality missing right there.
In addition, flex and silverlight have consistent APIs and objects actually suited to doing the job, whereas the browser javascript bindings are patchy and inconsistent so you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get it working properly on any decent share of clients.
Ajax libraries consist mostly of huge kludges to bypass this.
Eventually of course we can expect javascript to be typed, support namespaces, and be backed with a proper, standardized GUI library and vector graphics. But flex is basically all that right now, except for blending into the html page.
If your impression is that agile methods are directionless then you have met poor practitioners or read negatively selective descriptions. It actually quite rigorous, but on other axes than traditional methods. They focus on process and feedback and controlling uncertainty as you go rather than pretending you can plan away uncertainty.
Of course like any buzzword it attracts unwarranted 'namedropping' use, and like any subculture it attracts overzealous idiots who just want to be 'part of it' and look down on others. But that doesn't really say a lot about what it can offer or not.
No, agile really is different from the old methods. And it's not that much about how to code it's about how to run a project, maintain control, and be able to deal with changing requirements.
You still need good coders, it won't magically improve anyone. But you need more than that. There is no lack of failed projects staffed with good coders. If your projects regularly succeed, you are also employing some planning and management skill that is evidently not obvious to everyone.
The world is full of people who somehow read the message "the universe serves no purpose" into cosmology and "people have no purpose" into evolutionary biology
But if you don't believe in some form of "god", isn't that message implied?
If you limit it to the "external, greater-than-man" meaning of purpouse, then yes. But if I read correctly, that 'if' was introduced by you. Where did you get the "don't believe in some form of 'god'" part from?
You're introducing a second premise of your own invention, and thereby making an statement that is true, but does not represent a valid inference from the position you attack.
Your argument holds only if one does not "believe in some form of 'god'", which is an entirely personal thing. Cosmology and evolutionary biology does not concern itself with such questions. They might discover evidence against details of specific theocentric worldviews, but there is no conflict in believing science is the best/only worthwhile way to study nature, and at the same time speculate on creation and meaning of the universe. The latter is decidedly unscientific, but not everything we do has to be scientific. Science does have to though, and part of being scientific is not making stating as true what cannot be backed up by evidence. So while the 'scientist with a petri dish' or 'great big simulation' versions of an external, purposeful creator might appeal to many scientists, it lies beyond science to discuss it, since it can never be tested.
In other words, organisms are evolving ways to evolve better.
Which is hardly something new. The success of sexual (as opposed to asexual) reproduction, despite the very large cost and risk it incurs for most species, is probably in large part due to it accelerating adaptation.
No such thing. Stupid? Sure. Lotsofem. But to be conisdered a trick and not just a normal use of the syntax, it is by defenition a case where you should really be writing a parser. It's not that hard, and a helluva lot easier to discover and fix bugs in.
I love regexes too. Where they're useful, which is for automating tedious but trivial matcheing. But they have done no end of harm to the competency of the average geek by allowing them to indefinitely postpone learning how to writr a simple parser, which is really something every programmer should know. I'm not even talking yacc/lexx (but yous hould know when to go read up on that too), even just a simple char by char or tokeniser based little state thing will sort out a lot of stuff in a clear, simple and above all understandable way that would require a totally unreadable mess of a rfegex that probably contains five bugs you will never spot.
Sure, it might take a page of code in stead of code in stead of a 128-long line, but you will be well into understanding it and customising it to your needs before you're even halfaw reading that monster regex.
Yes, I can write those too if I have too, and have, but it about as mainainable as self-modifying machine code. The complex cases are simply lousy at explaining what they do, and in most cases less efficient that a well written string parsiing routine. If you haven't grown out of the illusion that compact code is faster to execute or even code (let alone maintain), you probably can't write a foolproof regex for a complex syntax anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista is not perfect, but it's a *lot* nicer than NT4, 2000 for the desktop, 98, 95. Whether it's better than XP is somewhat debatable,
But that is the point: All the other major windows revs brought really significant improvements, either in terms of functionality or stability or speed (yes, one of them was in fact faster than its predecessor). Vista brings basically nothing important compared to XP.
I don't know if the upgrade myth really existed, but if it did, this does demonstrate that people and companies do not upgrade just because there is something newer out there. They will actually to some degree evaluate whether the benefits are worth the cost and inconvenience for them.
But of course, as you mention, support weighs in pretty heftily in that equation.
It's the content of the article that matters, no
matter who the author;
Yes, but if the content incorporates more than facts widely known to be previously proven, and clear and verifiable logic building on those, evaluating the content is very far from trivial.
If you are unable to, or cannot be expected to, do a thorough vetting of all remaining claims in the content, then you are in reality really also being asked to _believe_ the author's claims of knowledge, and to _trust_ his judgement in handling it.
For that, reputation and past transgressions do indeed matter rather a lot.
This graph cannot be understood without additional information.
No graph can. Today we have many established idioms for graphs that provide that extra information (and that some graphs try to exploit to mislead us).
Back then all this was fairly new.
But, yeah, bars have the advantage that they work whether you read them by area or length.
The disadvantage is that if you have both very small and very large values, they become hard to compare and the small ones will be hard to read. If you vary more than one dimension of each 'blob', you can express a larger range of values in an appreciable way and in in a smaller space. And the scale of the values are easier to compare visually, if you know that area is the key.
Only shows how little you know.
Her work was not just capable, it was revolutionary, and it is noted not because she was a woman but because it was groundbreaking in several fields central to modern civilization, largely founding one of them. It would have attracted attention in any case. And it did.
What the parent to your post quite rightly claimed was merely that such accomplishments, in that time, were it by a man, would normally bring with it not just recognition but a high position and significant power. In fact she received (mostly) only the recognition, while some of the the career paths she had clearly qualified to remained simply not open to women regardless of merit. As most loyal citizens of the time probably considered both normal and proper.
What's sad is people relying on their razor blade purchases to donate to charity
and complaining when it's the wrong one.
Jeez, it's not like most medical research is funded by Gillette anyway, it's just marketing.
If you really care about prostate cancer research, go and donate to that. If you for some reason
want razor blades without contributing to breast cancer research, buy some different
ones. And a backbone. You are not being discriminated.
Why do people still listen to the media is beyond me.
Because the ones who stop and start listening to their navels in stead invariably start spouting preposterous junk.
Media usage guidelines:
1) There is no 'the media', only lots of different channels trying to make a buck
2) The media channels are rarely the source of the information. There are actually millions of independent sources trying to get through. Some are accepted and distributed by few or many media channels.
3) The source usually has a clear agenda, which will color the information
4) The media channel usually has an agenda to make money, which will color the selection and presentation of stories.
5) The media channel may have other agendas which will color selection and presentation.
6) Your other sources of information have agendas too.
All this is normal and known to everyone. Just consider the source, consider the messenger, factor that into what you hear, see and read, and just deal with it.
Provided you wear all-over swimwear.
BO and other odors are (by definition) volatile and may or may not be able to condense on the material...
Superhydrophobic surfaces and textile coverings have been around for a little while.
The news here is the one-step solvent-free process,
which will make industrialization a lot cheaper.
Youtube has lots on "superhydrophobic" and "nanotech fabric/textile"
Here's a cool demo: they sink a white sofa into a read bath, and pull it out again spotless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ytrQs1B5QY
How about soapy water?
I don't think it renders water massless.
Amen to that. But it's mainly a question of bad design/ignorance.
The (necessarily 3rd person) 2D levels have always been specifically designed for easy viewing from a 'static camera'. Otherwise you would hardly ever see your character. Somehow people manage to forget this aspect of level design when they move to third-person 3D.
Unless you have some amazingly awesome automatic camera controls, or are willing to spend on levels that are well-designed for well-placed static 3D cameras, you better stick to the only two easy options: static 2D cam or first person 3D.
The only thing they really have going for them are the development environments.
I'd like that to be true, but it's not.
Canvas support in browsers is basically not there, so that's a pretty huge chunk of functionality missing right there.
In addition, flex and silverlight have consistent APIs and objects actually suited to doing the job, whereas the browser javascript bindings are patchy and inconsistent so you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get it working properly on any decent share of clients.
Ajax libraries consist mostly of huge kludges to bypass this.
Eventually of course we can expect javascript to be typed, support namespaces, and be backed with a proper, standardized GUI library and vector graphics. But flex is basically all that right now, except for blending into the html page.
24 seconds talking about the opposite sex.
I'm gay, you insensitive clod.
Oh, wait.
No I'm not.
no, I've done both and they are very different.
If your impression is that agile methods are directionless then you have met poor practitioners or read negatively selective descriptions. It actually quite rigorous, but on other axes than traditional methods. They focus on process and feedback and controlling uncertainty as you go rather than pretending you can plan away uncertainty.
Of course like any buzzword it attracts unwarranted 'namedropping' use, and like any subculture it attracts overzealous idiots who just want to be 'part of it' and look down on others. But that doesn't really say a lot about what it can offer or not.
No, agile really is different from the old methods. And it's not that much about how to code it's about how to run a project, maintain control, and be able to deal with changing requirements.
You still need good coders, it won't magically improve anyone. But you need more than that. There is no lack of failed projects staffed with good coders. If your projects regularly succeed, you are also employing some planning and management skill that is evidently not obvious to everyone.
list the steps from requirements gathering right through to production deployment.
That would not be agile :-)
Fair enough. I just don't defend the tried and broken ones, like many do.
I don't know about you,
Dude, he just told you.
I [...] still would've banned him from my place (possibly after giving precisely ONE warning to never do that again).
Wow, you sound like a really generous person. I'm sure you have lots of friends to ban.
The world is full of people who somehow read the message "the universe serves no purpose" into cosmology and "people have no purpose" into evolutionary biology
But if you don't believe in some form of "god", isn't that message implied?
If you limit it to the "external, greater-than-man" meaning of purpouse, then yes.
But if I read correctly, that 'if' was introduced by you. Where did you get the "don't believe in some form of 'god'" part from?
You're introducing a second premise of your own invention, and thereby making an statement that is true, but does not represent a valid inference from the position you attack.
Your argument holds only if one does not "believe in some form of 'god'", which is an entirely personal thing. Cosmology and evolutionary biology does not concern itself with such questions. They might discover evidence against details of specific theocentric worldviews, but there is no conflict in believing science is the best/only worthwhile way to study nature, and at the same time speculate on creation and meaning of the universe. The latter is decidedly unscientific, but not everything we do has to be scientific. Science does have to though, and part of being scientific is not making stating as true what cannot be backed up by evidence. So while the 'scientist with a petri dish' or 'great big simulation' versions of an external, purposeful creator might appeal to many scientists, it lies beyond science to discuss it, since it can never be tested.
Well ARM not laughing.
In other words, organisms are evolving ways to evolve better.
Which is hardly something new. The success of sexual (as opposed to asexual) reproduction, despite the very large cost and risk it incurs for most species, is probably in large part due to it accelerating adaptation.
I think buying new land and moving _there_ would be cheaper than buying land and moving _it_.
But how about chopping off the atoll and jacking it up?
(kidding)
-when we'll be comparing novels to text messaging.
No such thing. Stupid? Sure. Lotsofem.
But to be conisdered a trick and not just a normal use of the syntax, it is by defenition a case where you should really be writing a parser. It's not that hard, and a helluva lot easier to discover and fix bugs in.
I love regexes too. Where they're useful, which is for automating tedious but trivial matcheing. But they have done no end of harm to the competency of the average geek by allowing them to indefinitely postpone learning how to writr a simple parser, which is really something every programmer should know. I'm not even talking yacc/lexx (but yous hould know when to go read up on that too), even just a simple char by char or tokeniser based little state thing will sort out a lot of stuff in a clear, simple and above all understandable way that would require a totally unreadable mess of a rfegex that probably contains five bugs you will never spot.
Sure, it might take a page of code in stead of code in stead of a 128-long line, but you will be well into understanding it and customising it to your needs before you're even halfaw reading that monster regex.
Yes, I can write those too if I have too, and have, but it about as mainainable as self-modifying machine code. The complex cases are simply lousy at explaining what they do, and in most cases less efficient that a well written string parsiing routine. If you haven't grown out of the illusion that compact code is faster to execute or even code (let alone maintain), you probably can't write a foolproof regex for a complex syntax anyway.