What are you taking about? OCR of the candidates name? Where in the process would you possibly OCR the candidates name? The thing that needs to be scanned quickly and accurately (for paper ballots) is what box is filled in. You know what name is next to the box because you printed the ballot in the first place.
My post was a bit flippant, I'll be the first to agree. I was just reacting to your sugestion that you had agreed only to exchange money for a plastic disc that has information on it, and hadn't agreed to anything about what you could do with it. I found that disingenuous; you are certainly aware of the conventions of your society, and knew what implicit agreement you were making when you bought the disc.
In any case, we seem to agree that the question is whether certain conventions/laws do more good then harm, and I too prefer to lean toward personal liberty whenever possible.
We live in a society where the things that many of us (me, for example) produce are informational in nature. While it may seem odd to say you can't run off a few copies of a book you own, it is ceratinly convenient that I can sell you a copy without having to have you sign a contract saying you won't.
"The only agreement I made was the exchange of pieces of paper for a plastic, aluminum, paper, and laquer disc with indentations on it that can be read by a special device in a means to produce music. To state that I also agreed to copyright simply because it is forced upon me, outside of any written contract or sign of free will, is ludicrous."
I have never made any agreement that I would not come into your home and take your stereo, or for that matter, that I would consider that particular home and stereo yours in the first place.
What's ludicrous is to suggest intelectual property is inherently illegitamite because, like all property, it is based on societal conventions; or that it is bad because those conventions (laws) are backed up by "force", like all laws.
Lots of people are chiming in to say they were a programmer 20 years ago, but you've got the gist of right on. The vast majority of people who have ever considered themselves a programmer started programming in the last 20 years, if not 10 years. As a proffesion, our numbers have swelled hugely in the last two decades, and most of these new programmers have been young (just because most people starting a new carreer are.) I know a few people older than me that have switched careers away from programming, and a few who have switched to it from something else. And a vast number younger than me who have started out programming as their first career.
There is no mysterious disapearance of old coders responsible for the lopsided demographics. There's just a not-so-mysterious massive influx of young coders. Wait 20 years and I suspect the age distribution will be much more uniform.
Open source software, great as it is, played no significant role, pro or con, in the rise of the PC to dominance.
IBM doesn't make any cash at all from every PC product sold, because they gave up the software end, figuring the real money was in hardware (oops). Then Compaq reverse engineered their bios chips and broke their lock on the hardware. IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore. The PC rose to dominance essentially because IBM blew it repeatedly, and lost control of the platform they created.
Are you aware that the combination of font color and background on http://www.astradyne.co.uk/tet renders the text almost entirely unreadable? I always wonder "what were they thinking?" when I see such a combination. Knowing that this example is the home page of someone who claims to be both a web page designer and a typography freak, I've got to actually ask: What were you thinking?
I can only assume that on your monitor it looks better, but just so you know, on my LCD screen, (which I don't think is too far from the norm since most other stuff looks fine) I can read the basic, non-link text your website only by carefullly concentrating on each letter individually. Or, really, by using the old select-all trick to highlight all the text on the page, defeating your color choices.
I'm honestly not trying to flame you here; if you are a typography freak, I figure you'd like to know.
It's a bit late to hope people keep their heads together, and definitely late to speculate that they might actually be doing so. Google & Red Hat both have price/earnings ratios over 80. That is an order of magnitude beyond where it makes sense to buy the stock based on hoping to make money because the company makes profits. That leaves the other way to make money from stocks: buying in earlier and making money by selling to those who buy in later, and lose their money. Like any pyramid scheme, it must eventually collapse, screwing the losers. You may think you're early enough to be a winner, but then again, the scheme depends on the losers eventually thinking that too.
I think it unlikely that either Red Hat or Google will see earnings increases of one or two thousand percent in the near term. So either they'll tank, or, best case, they will slowly catch up to expectations over the very long term, and wind up being merely a poor investment, rather than a disasterous one.
So the thing in question is running out of propulsive power, becoming more like an inert object thrown in the air, soon to reach it's apogee and begin its inevitable, uncontrolled downard acceleration, attaining its maximum velocity just as it impacts with the ground. Is that supposed to be good? Do I want to be part of that?
I don't think they just "tossed in" anything. I think they know exactly what they are reffering to. Computer viruses were used to attack command & control infrastructure during the FIRST gulf war. This is not new-fangled pie-in-the-sky stuff. Should this stuff be part of the Air Force? Well, yeah it sounds arbitrary, but the division of tasks between services is pretty arbitrary anyway. If it involves boats, Navy. Planes and no boats, Air Force. Beyond that, all bets are off, and there are exceptions to those. The intelligence community does seem like the logical choice to develop info-war stuff, but then again, much of their funding goes through the Air Force anyway.
You seem to be complaining that http doesn't do a good job of being a state-maintaining, connected protocol. In other news, Ferrari sports cars suck for bulk freight transport. If you want a protocol that acts like telnet, might I suggest you use telnet?
HTTP is perfectly good at doing what it does, and it's existence does not prevent you from using any of various other fine protocols that are designed to do other things. I'll readily agree that the decision to send passwords as clear text was a foolish one; but it is a decision that was made by the writers of web browsers, not the designers of the http protocol. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from encrypting whatever you want before using http to send it.
Um, yes, actually, that's exactly what HTTP is. The client software everyone has (web browsers) has pretty limited features, and is kind of quirky, which leads to all kinds of pain. But there's notrhing wrong with the protocol. You could easiily write a full featured, robust http client to do whatever you want (and people do). The frustration and problems come in because it would be really cool if you could write apps for a full featured, robust client that everyone already had; and web browsers aren't that client, but they are close enough to fake it in some cases.
So if it were up to you, Neo-Nazis who want to kill millions of people would get freedom of speech, but muslims who want to kill millions of people wouldn't. Interesting; I'm not entirely sure what the logic is there. Here's my plan: How about if we let everybody have freedom of speech, just don't let them kill or rape people.
You seem to be sugesting that the ACLU defends peoples right to be "serial predatory child rapists" or "violent totalitarian jihadi zealots" as opposed to just defending peoples right to free speech regardless of who they are. Of course, you can't really be saying that can you? Because that would be completely idiotic.
"The ACLU has little to do with defending individual rights and everything to do with advancing a socialist agenda." Never mind.
Can you name any of these "favorite issues" or bad positions? Do you oppose the ACLU, or the silly carictature of it presented by politicians wishing to smear an opponent who once gave them 10 bucks?
As far as I'm aware, the ACLUs favorite issues are freedom of speech, the right to peacably assemble, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, etc. Which of these are you against?
Freedom of Speech does not mean you are protected from their ever being any consequences of that speech.
You have the right to say whatever you please about whomever you please; and if what you say is knowingly false and injurious to someone, they have the right to sue you. Note that, presumably in deference to the first ammendment, it is significantly harder to show libel in the US than in most western democracies. The plantiff has to show that what you said injured them, and that you knew it was false. It's not particularly hard to avoid libel, just stick to accusations you think are true, or have know way of knowing.
Re: Good code is self documenting...
on
How to Write Comments
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Self-documenting code is a wonderful thing, and greatly reduces the need for comments. Whenever someone brings this up, others say no, and eventually present an example such as yours: Entirely non-self-documenting. What the hell kind of variable names are those? L? a method named i()? Spell out "inverse" for gods sake! Of course you can't follow it. Hell, I know what Cholesky decomposition is, and I've read your explanation and I still don't know WTF that code is doing. I'll bet you needed 17 lines of comments. If you had instead changed the var names to something sufficiently descriptive, the code would successfully document what it is doing, leaving you to write a comment describing why; I suspect the third sentence of your post would have sufficed.
Re:Comment every conditional branch or loop
on
How to Write Comments
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What a great example of lousty code and worse comments. How about the folowing... (Slashdot appears to offer a couple different ways to mis-format code; I've chosen incorrect indenting over comments can't start a line)
// the only thing a comment here should explain is why you use & and not ==
if (uFileHeader & VALID_FILE_HEADER)
{
printf("File shares at least one set bit with a valid file!\n");
}
else
{ // reason "blah, blah, blah", which I can not imagine existing, // certainly deserves a comment, but it applies to the decision // to say (falsely) "file not found", so it belongs here.
printf("File not found.\n");
}
It would be amazing if it could be done, and I too would at least consider paying for a 50% effective missile defense. But it isn't 50% effective. It's 0% effective. We went ahead and built the part in Alaska at great expense without ever having a successful full scale test. What few tests there have been have been rigged to various degrees, and it has failed most of them anyway. The biggest real world success was shooting down a target missile that was carrying a radio beacon, broadcasting it's position. I mean no disrespect to the engineers involved; they've done very impressive work. But the task does not appear to be achievable. Unless you consider that the task is to funnel money to specific campaign-contributing contractors & key congression districts. At that task missle defense has been a huge success. Meanwhile, ICBM seems like about the least likely way anyone would try to deliver a bomb to America.
"The big deal about web mapping services for GIS shops is whether or not they work with the back end systems"
Frankly, this is ESRI marketing. Every serious GIS app there is handles each others formats fine. Certainly they all handle ESRI SHP files, because as you say, ESRI is the leader, particularly in government. I personally use ESRI file formats all day, but almost never ESRI software. MapInfo is better on the desktop, and MapGuide is better on the web. (which is really saying something, as both are, in some sense, kludgey piles of doo-doo)
ESRI software is, as you say, massively expensive, and it's also not something I would ever describe as an "easy way to go". Autodesk MapGuide had been a somewhat expensive, (IMO) slightly better competitor, which still was making only a small dent in ESRIs position.
Along comes the open source MapServer, which is oboviously not expensive, is quite good, and getting better. To whatever extent this looks like a problem for #1 ESRI (and it looks like a significant one), it has to look like an even bigger problem for #2 AutoDesk. So someone at AutoDesk had a good idea. They gave their code to MapServer, and started a foundation to support it with a seat for them on the board. So now MapServer can take the fight to ESRI, and is in an even better position to do so. And if it works, and their now open code base takes over the market, what do you know, Autodesk held back a few nice tools (MapGuide Author) they can still sell.
No offense, but you don't know squat about MapGuide. I some circles, people have been comparing GMaps against the standard (MapGuide) ever since GMaps came out. The result of this comparison is that GMaps is fast, easy to set up and integrate with, and looks awesome. It's just too bad can't run the server yourself, and you have essentially no control over the map compared to MapGuide.
Google Maps is to MapGuide is to MapServer as Picassa is to Photoshop is to the GIMP. Except today, what Autodesk did is like if the Photoshop source code was donated to the GIMP team. The high-end web based mapping world is on it's head, and waiting to see how it all turns out. But Google Maps isn't worth talking about in this context (yet).
This is somewhat confusing, because the web-based mapping world can only come up with one and a half product names:
"MapServer" is an excellent open-source web-based mapping app, which before today would have been considered the big threat to MapGuide.
"MapGuide" is (was) AutoDesks web-based mapping system, one part of which is called "MapGuide Server". Much of this system was just open sourced.
The "MapServer Foundation" has been established by Autodesk, the MapServer team, and some others, to encourage and manage development of both MapServer and "MapServer Enterprise", the latter being the project previously known as MapGuide.
"...but is [MapGuide] as viable a platform as GMaps?"
Is Picassa as viable as Photoshop? I'm not saying Picassa or GMaps are bad, because they are both quite good; but they're just not targeting the same functionality level as Photoshop or MapGuide.
Google Maps is cool, but it has a long way to go before it is a MapGuide competitor. GM is certainly superior if you want to do something quick and easy, but if you want to run the server, control all the data shown on the map and the presentation, tie it into your databases, Google maps isn't what you want. MapGuide is.
That said, I'm sure GMaps and MS MapPoint have something to do with this decision. They are taking over (and expanding) the low end of web based mapping, leaving MapGuide with the high end (which was previously all there was). Autodesk can see that eventually Google Maps etc. will grow in capability and begin to threaten it. Now people who are pushing what GMaps can do, or want to go a little beyond it can use MapGuide, and still not have to pay.
Note that ADesk is not giving away MapGuide Author. You don't really need it to use the rest, or to do simple stuff. But it is pretty nice, and those of us doing really high end web mapping will still pay for it.
Basically, this move tells me someone at ADesk is smarter than I thought. They are opening up stuff that has free competitors while those free competitors are still way behind. Makes sense. If people are going to use something free, it's still better to have them use yours.
The problem with the sentence you quote is the ommission of the word "model". By the definitions you offer, engine(1) and motor(1) seem pretty interchangeable to me, and either definition of engine seems to work fine in the context at hand. What exactly are you asking anyone to get right? Is this just an experiment to see if any post containing a definition will get modded up? I guess it worked. <br><br>
<b>informative adj</b><br>
tending to increase knowledge or dissipate ignorance<br><br>
The "article" is not much longer than the summary. In any case you should read, or perhaps understand, the post you are replying to. Both the article and the summary describe this is as a "fully functional" engine. It is not. It is a paper model of an engine. It has impressively detailed moving parts, which are spun round by the aforementioned non-paper electric motor. But the sentence you quoted is false; it does not produce torque by consuming fuel, which is what engines do.
I am not aware of any scientist who claims to know how first life began with any certainty, and in any case the theory of evolution does not address how life began. Evolution describes how life has developed after it began, including quite a bit of time before we were around to see it in action. Despite no one having been around yet to see it first hand, it is still one of the most well established scientific theories there are.
No one has ever seen plate tectonics "in action". Why don't the fundies leave biology alone and go bug the geologists for a while?
Slashdot Mirror
What are you taking about? OCR of the candidates name? Where in the process would you possibly OCR the candidates name? The thing that needs to be scanned quickly and accurately (for paper ballots) is what box is filled in. You know what name is next to the box because you printed the ballot in the first place.
My post was a bit flippant, I'll be the first to agree. I was just reacting to your sugestion that you had agreed only to exchange money for a plastic disc that has information on it, and hadn't agreed to anything about what you could do with it. I found that disingenuous; you are certainly aware of the conventions of your society, and knew what implicit agreement you were making when you bought the disc.
In any case, we seem to agree that the question is whether certain conventions/laws do more good then harm, and I too prefer to lean toward personal liberty whenever possible.
We live in a society where the things that many of us (me, for example) produce are informational in nature. While it may seem odd to say you can't run off a few copies of a book you own, it is ceratinly convenient that I can sell you a copy without having to have you sign a contract saying you won't.
"The only agreement I made was the exchange of pieces of paper for a plastic, aluminum, paper, and laquer disc with indentations on it that can be read by a special device in a means to produce music. To state that I also agreed to copyright simply because it is forced upon me, outside of any written contract or sign of free will, is ludicrous."
I have never made any agreement that I would not come into your home and take your stereo, or for that matter, that I would consider that particular home and stereo yours in the first place.
What's ludicrous is to suggest intelectual property is inherently illegitamite because, like all property, it is based on societal conventions; or that it is bad because those conventions (laws) are backed up by "force", like all laws.
Lots of people are chiming in to say they were a programmer 20 years ago, but you've got the gist of right on. The vast majority of people who have ever considered themselves a programmer started programming in the last 20 years, if not 10 years. As a proffesion, our numbers have swelled hugely in the last two decades, and most of these new programmers have been young (just because most people starting a new carreer are.) I know a few people older than me that have switched careers away from programming, and a few who have switched to it from something else. And a vast number younger than me who have started out programming as their first career.
There is no mysterious disapearance of old coders responsible for the lopsided demographics. There's just a not-so-mysterious massive influx of young coders. Wait 20 years and I suspect the age distribution will be much more uniform.
Open source software, great as it is, played no significant role, pro or con, in the rise of the PC to dominance.
IBM doesn't make any cash at all from every PC product sold, because they gave up the software end, figuring the real money was in hardware (oops). Then Compaq reverse engineered their bios chips and broke their lock on the hardware. IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore. The PC rose to dominance essentially because IBM blew it repeatedly, and lost control of the platform they created.
To put it more politely than the AC:
Are you aware that the combination of font color and background on http://www.astradyne.co.uk/tet renders the text almost entirely unreadable? I always wonder "what were they thinking?" when I see such a combination. Knowing that this example is the home page of someone who claims to be both a web page designer and a typography freak, I've got to actually ask: What were you thinking?
I can only assume that on your monitor it looks better, but just so you know, on my LCD screen, (which I don't think is too far from the norm since most other stuff looks fine) I can read the basic, non-link text your website only by carefullly concentrating on each letter individually. Or, really, by using the old select-all trick to highlight all the text on the page, defeating your color choices.
I'm honestly not trying to flame you here; if you are a typography freak, I figure you'd like to know.
It's a bit late to hope people keep their heads together, and definitely late to speculate that they might actually be doing so.
Google & Red Hat both have price/earnings ratios over 80. That is an order of magnitude beyond where it makes sense to buy the stock based on hoping to make money because the company makes profits. That leaves the other way to make money from stocks: buying in earlier and making money by selling to those who buy in later, and lose their money. Like any pyramid scheme, it must eventually collapse, screwing the losers. You may think you're early enough to be a winner, but then again, the scheme depends on the losers eventually thinking that too.
I think it unlikely that either Red Hat or Google will see earnings increases of one or two thousand percent in the near term. So either they'll tank, or, best case, they will slowly catch up to expectations over the very long term, and wind up being merely a poor investment, rather than a disasterous one.
"increasingly ballistic trajectory"
So the thing in question is running out of propulsive power, becoming more like an inert object thrown in the air, soon to reach it's apogee and begin its inevitable, uncontrolled downard acceleration, attaining its maximum velocity just as it impacts with the ground. Is that supposed to be good? Do I want to be part of that?
I don't think they just "tossed in" anything. I think they know exactly what they are reffering to. Computer viruses were used to attack command & control infrastructure during the FIRST gulf war. This is not new-fangled pie-in-the-sky stuff. Should this stuff be part of the Air Force? Well, yeah it sounds arbitrary, but the division of tasks between services is pretty arbitrary anyway. If it involves boats, Navy. Planes and no boats, Air Force. Beyond that, all bets are off, and there are exceptions to those. The intelligence community does seem like the logical choice to develop info-war stuff, but then again, much of their funding goes through the Air Force anyway.
You seem to be complaining that http doesn't do a good job of being a state-maintaining, connected protocol. In other news, Ferrari sports cars suck for bulk freight transport. If you want a protocol that acts like telnet, might I suggest you use telnet?
HTTP is perfectly good at doing what it does, and it's existence does not prevent you from using any of various other fine protocols that are designed to do other things. I'll readily agree that the decision to send passwords as clear text was a foolish one; but it is a decision that was made by the writers of web browsers, not the designers of the http protocol. There is nothing whatsoever stopping you from encrypting whatever you want before using http to send it.
"HTTP isn't a client - server protocol"
Um, yes, actually, that's exactly what HTTP is. The client software everyone has (web browsers) has pretty limited features, and is kind of quirky, which leads to all kinds of pain. But there's notrhing wrong with the protocol. You could easiily write a full featured, robust http client to do whatever you want (and people do). The frustration and problems come in because it would be really cool if you could write apps for a full featured, robust client that everyone already had; and web browsers aren't that client, but they are close enough to fake it in some cases.
So if it were up to you, Neo-Nazis who want to kill millions of people would get freedom of speech, but muslims who want to kill millions of people wouldn't. Interesting; I'm not entirely sure what the logic is there. Here's my plan: How about if we let everybody have freedom of speech, just don't let them kill or rape people.
You seem to be sugesting that the ACLU defends peoples right to be "serial predatory child rapists" or "violent totalitarian jihadi zealots" as opposed to just defending peoples right to free speech regardless of who they are. Of course, you can't really be saying that can you? Because that would be completely idiotic.
"The ACLU has little to do with defending individual rights and everything to do with advancing a socialist agenda."
Never mind.
Students are allowed to pray in school, and the ACLU has gone to court to defend this right. Next straw man please.
Can you name any of these "favorite issues" or bad positions? Do you oppose the ACLU, or the silly carictature of it presented by politicians wishing to smear an opponent who once gave them 10 bucks?
As far as I'm aware, the ACLUs favorite issues are freedom of speech, the right to peacably assemble, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, etc. Which of these are you against?
Freedom of Speech does not mean you are protected from their ever being any consequences of that speech.
You have the right to say whatever you please about whomever you please; and if what you say is knowingly false and injurious to someone, they have the right to sue you. Note that, presumably in deference to the first ammendment, it is significantly harder to show libel in the US than in most western democracies. The plantiff has to show that what you said injured them, and that you knew it was false. It's not particularly hard to avoid libel, just stick to accusations you think are true, or have know way of knowing.
Self-documenting code is a wonderful thing, and greatly reduces the need for comments. Whenever someone brings this up, others say no, and eventually present an example such as yours: Entirely non-self-documenting. What the hell kind of variable names are those? L? a method named i()? Spell out "inverse" for gods sake! Of course you can't follow it. Hell, I know what Cholesky decomposition is, and I've read your explanation and I still don't know WTF that code is doing. I'll bet you needed 17 lines of comments. If you had instead changed the var names to something sufficiently descriptive, the code would successfully document what it is doing, leaving you to write a comment describing why; I suspect the third sentence of your post would have sufficed.
What a great example of lousty code and worse comments. How about the folowing... (Slashdot appears to offer a couple different ways to mis-format code; I've chosen incorrect indenting over comments can't start a line)
// reason "blah, blah, blah", which I can not imagine existing,
// certainly deserves a comment, but it applies to the decision
// to say (falsely) "file not found", so it belongs here.
// the only thing a comment here should explain is why you use & and not ==
if (uFileHeader & VALID_FILE_HEADER)
{
printf("File shares at least one set bit with a valid file!\n");
}
else
{
printf("File not found.\n");
}
It would be amazing if it could be done, and I too would at least consider paying for a 50% effective missile defense. But it isn't 50% effective. It's 0% effective. We went ahead and built the part in Alaska at great expense without ever having a successful full scale test. What few tests there have been have been rigged to various degrees, and it has failed most of them anyway. The biggest real world success was shooting down a target missile that was carrying a radio beacon, broadcasting it's position.
I mean no disrespect to the engineers involved; they've done very impressive work. But the task does not appear to be achievable. Unless you consider that the task is to funnel money to specific campaign-contributing contractors & key congression districts. At that task missle defense has been a huge success. Meanwhile, ICBM seems like about the least likely way anyone would try to deliver a bomb to America.
"The big deal about web mapping services for GIS shops is whether or not they work with the back end systems"
Frankly, this is ESRI marketing. Every serious GIS app there is handles each others formats fine. Certainly they all handle ESRI SHP files, because as you say, ESRI is the leader, particularly in government. I personally use ESRI file formats all day, but almost never ESRI software. MapInfo is better on the desktop, and MapGuide is better on the web. (which is really saying something, as both are, in some sense, kludgey piles of doo-doo)
ESRI software is, as you say, massively expensive, and it's also not something I would ever describe as an "easy way to go". Autodesk MapGuide had been a somewhat expensive, (IMO) slightly better competitor, which still was making only a small dent in ESRIs position.
Along comes the open source MapServer, which is oboviously not expensive, is quite good, and getting better. To whatever extent this looks like a problem for #1 ESRI (and it looks like a significant one), it has to look like an even bigger problem for #2 AutoDesk. So someone at AutoDesk had a good idea. They gave their code to MapServer, and started a foundation to support it with a seat for them on the board. So now MapServer can take the fight to ESRI, and is in an even better position to do so. And if it works, and their now open code base takes over the market, what do you know, Autodesk held back a few nice tools (MapGuide Author) they can still sell.
No offense, but you don't know squat about MapGuide. I some circles, people have been comparing GMaps against the standard (MapGuide) ever since GMaps came out. The result of this comparison is that GMaps is fast, easy to set up and integrate with, and looks awesome. It's just too bad can't run the server yourself, and you have essentially no control over the map compared to MapGuide.
Google Maps is to MapGuide is to MapServer as Picassa is to Photoshop is to the GIMP. Except today, what Autodesk did is like if the Photoshop source code was donated to the GIMP team. The high-end web based mapping world is on it's head, and waiting to see how it all turns out. But Google Maps isn't worth talking about in this context (yet).
This is somewhat confusing, because the web-based mapping world can only come up with one and a half product names:
"MapServer" is an excellent open-source web-based mapping app, which before today would have been considered the big threat to MapGuide.
"MapGuide" is (was) AutoDesks web-based mapping system, one part of which is called "MapGuide Server". Much of this system was just open sourced.
The "MapServer Foundation" has been established by Autodesk, the MapServer team, and some others, to encourage and manage development of both MapServer and "MapServer Enterprise", the latter being the project previously known as MapGuide.
"...but is [MapGuide] as viable a platform as GMaps?"
Is Picassa as viable as Photoshop? I'm not saying Picassa or GMaps are bad, because they are both quite good; but they're just not targeting the same functionality level as Photoshop or MapGuide.
Google Maps is cool, but it has a long way to go before it is a MapGuide competitor. GM is certainly superior if you want to do something quick and easy, but if you want to run the server, control all the data shown on the map and the presentation, tie it into your databases, Google maps isn't what you want. MapGuide is.
That said, I'm sure GMaps and MS MapPoint have something to do with this decision. They are taking over (and expanding) the low end of web based mapping, leaving MapGuide with the high end (which was previously all there was). Autodesk can see that eventually Google Maps etc. will grow in capability and begin to threaten it. Now people who are pushing what GMaps can do, or want to go a little beyond it can use MapGuide, and still not have to pay.
Note that ADesk is not giving away MapGuide Author. You don't really need it to use the rest, or to do simple stuff. But it is pretty nice, and those of us doing really high end web mapping will still pay for it.
Basically, this move tells me someone at ADesk is smarter than I thought. They are opening up stuff that has free competitors while those free competitors are still way behind. Makes sense. If people are going to use something free, it's still better to have them use yours.
The problem with the sentence you quote is the ommission of the word "model". By the definitions you offer, engine(1) and motor(1) seem pretty interchangeable to me, and either definition of engine seems to work fine in the context at hand. What exactly are you asking anyone to get right? Is this just an experiment to see if any post containing a definition will get modded up? I guess it worked. <br><br>
<b>informative adj</b><br>
tending to increase knowledge or dissipate ignorance<br><br>
The "article" is not much longer than the summary. In any case you should read, or perhaps understand, the post you are replying to. Both the article and the summary describe this is as a "fully functional" engine. It is not. It is a paper model of an engine. It has impressively detailed moving parts, which are spun round by the aforementioned non-paper electric motor. But the sentence you quoted is false; it does not produce torque by consuming fuel, which is what engines do.
I am not aware of any scientist who claims to know how first life began with any certainty, and in any case the theory of evolution does not address how life began. Evolution describes how life has developed after it began, including quite a bit of time before we were around to see it in action. Despite no one having been around yet to see it first hand, it is still one of the most well established scientific theories there are.
No one has ever seen plate tectonics "in action". Why don't the fundies leave biology alone and go bug the geologists for a while?