> For me, it would be math. For the first eight yeras in school (including elementry and high), the courses
> taught that "7-9 is impossible".
Stupid, stupid curricilum. I learned about numbers by having them on a numbered line; negative numbers were there, right in front of me, from (I think) the second or third week of school.
I personally would guess the chance of life evolving to be very close to 1, given how quickly life evolved on earth. However, I have large problems with your estimate of how likely *intelligent* life is. Using the anthrophic principle, it seems like the chance of intelligent life could be reasonable put at a much, much higher value, given that it took 4.6 billion years to develop it here.
No, they can't. Trolltech is a norwegian company, and we have strict competition laws: You are not allowed to refuse business on arbitrary grounds. I'm fairly sure this would be considered arbitrary.
I don't even get what Trolltech is going on about with refusing "code that has earlier been distributed under the GPL" - it doesn't seem to make any sense, business-wise. They get money from the licensing - the only way it could make sense is if they want to avoid being associated with people "de-GPLing" code, to stay friendly with the open source folks?
The question isn't the number of free support sites - the question is what level of support you get from them. My experience is that the free support I get for high quality open source programs is generally much, much higher than the level of support I get for commercial programs - even when the commercial support is paid for and prioritized.
For some reason, you took this in the spirit of "something you should argue against" instead of something you should learn. Now, I'm perfectly willing to argue and show that you've been behaving as an ass, if that's what it takes for you to LEARN, NOW. So, to make you LEARN NOW, I'll do the shouting and behaving in your spirit, increasing the magnitude a bit so you can GET IT.
You see, you totally missed the point of my comment. (A) "The compiler could do it" is the same as saying the compiler is a verifier. It is. There are other verifiers that do more. And that doesn't matter: It still disprove your statement that there are no interesting invariants provable without adding to the code. There are, and you will accept that now, and from now on stop arguing and instead LEARN.
And (B) - it is possible to prove that the invariant holds true for every case for many invariants. This, however, is irrelevant to what we were discussion: You were claiming that the size of any interesting invariant would be the same as the entire program, and would be used instead of the program. This is trivially false, so UNDERSTAND THIS NOW.
As for proving that a particular implementation is quicksort: Yes, non-trivial. That's irrelevant for the point, which you can accept now, and accept that you are behaving as an ass, instead of actually chosing to LEARN NOW. I understand that you're pissed at yourself for being wrong; take it out in energy to LEARN NOW, and let the phase where you argued against new knowledge fall behind you.
If you have to hold your nose to vote republican and don't want to vote democrat, VOTE SOMETHING ELSE. No, it won't make anybody else get power *this election*. Think of it as an investment in public opinion. If enough people make this investment, people will see that it IS possible to get other parties up in the polls, and will vote for them - so they become a real alternative.
"Dating" is a US anti-sex custom related to the introduction of the box-on-wheels y'all love so much. That custom is, sadly, also spreading with americanized culture. Fortunately, it is under attack in the US itself, and will hopefully die shortly.
The only way I know to handle this is through top management buyin for policies with teeth. Not "some notice in a file", subtracted pay and/or firing. For everyone, including managers. The day the company fire a high level manager for violation is the day everybody starts actually following those policies.
Trivial. Human lifespan is tailored to support grandparents, plus a bit of redundancy. Different systems will fail when you go past that age, because there is (evolutionary) no benefit to living longer.
What beats me is that the effect is present for males as well as females. You'd think that living permanently would be a good idea for males (who stay reproductive, and have little strain from reproduction).
Pardon me, but I don't think your description makes much sense, and it doesn't sound like you know anything about operating system scalability. In a monolithic kernel design like Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or DragonflyBSD, "threads" are largely a user-space concept. Sure, you have kernel threads to run specialized tasks, but the bulk of the performance critical code runs "on top of" or "on behalf of" user tasks. This differs from a microkernel implementation where the kernel is really broken down into multiple threads that pass messages (even then, however, certain kernel functions like memory management and process scheduling must be centralized.)
DragonflyBSD is a message passing/microkernel refactor of FreeBSD, using kernel threads for "everything".
And DragonflyBSD could definately get better SMP support faster than FreeBSD, and I would expect NetBSD and OpenBSD. Dragonfly had (and to a degree has) the luxury of not having that many users and developers, and being able to mess up things and fix them again. FreeBSD has much less of that privilege, and as a such development speed is slower. (There's also much more communication overhead in FreeBSD, and "competing" internal projects.)
Interesting. Could you elaborate what issues you have had with it, which parts didn't work out for you?
I've never done what might be termed "complete XP", though I've adapted as many elements of it as has been possible to push into the situations I've been in (pair programming, test first, cut down time, minimize planning, estimation habits ++), and that's worked very well. I've got reason to believe the rest of the practices support this (from 20+ years of experience with programming projects), but I've not tested them all together.
And in other news, you are commenting on things you haven't tried in the real world, right?
Because I can't believe anybody can conclude, after having tried XP, that it is completely useless in the real world in all cases. There are cases where it is a good fit - many cases - and there are some where it is a bad fit, but after having taken the risk of actually testing it, it's clear that it is tremendously useful in the right context.
Have you actually tried XP? Because to me, what you write sounds like somebody that hasn't tried it, and just feel that this can't work, and passive-aggressively accuses those that have tried it and found it to work of being passive-aggressive;)
It actually works good even with a large experience/skill disparity between the programmers. I've only had the experience from the senior perspective - the juniors have said it worked well for them too. As they're still my friends (even though I've quit working with them), I believe them:)
Some programmers are solo beasts. Some are not. And it really depend on who they are collaborating with, and the setting around it.
Have you noticed the "with snacks" meme that is going around everywhere in XP? "We don't know why, but this works much better when there are snack available in reach of the programmers." This one is true, in my experience. Pair programming work much better with it in place...
I also found vi to be harder to learn than emacs; I just find that it has more "UI depth". Not programming hack depth (elisp is rich), but user interface depth. The more I learn vi, the more things transparently just happen - quickly. I never got that "totally out of the way" feeling from emacs...
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He's getting karma-wacked for a reasonable comment because of Star Wars fanboys.
> For me, it would be math. For the first eight yeras in school (including elementry and high), the courses > taught that "7-9 is impossible". Stupid, stupid curricilum. I learned about numbers by having them on a numbered line; negative numbers were there, right in front of me, from (I think) the second or third week of school.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I don't even get what Trolltech is going on about with refusing "code that has earlier been distributed under the GPL" - it doesn't seem to make any sense, business-wise. They get money from the licensing - the only way it could make sense is if they want to avoid being associated with people "de-GPLing" code, to stay friendly with the open source folks?
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
You see, you totally missed the point of my comment. (A) "The compiler could do it" is the same as saying the compiler is a verifier. It is. There are other verifiers that do more. And that doesn't matter: It still disprove your statement that there are no interesting invariants provable without adding to the code. There are, and you will accept that now, and from now on stop arguing and instead LEARN.
And (B) - it is possible to prove that the invariant holds true for every case for many invariants. This, however, is irrelevant to what we were discussion: You were claiming that the size of any interesting invariant would be the same as the entire program, and would be used instead of the program. This is trivially false, so UNDERSTAND THIS NOW.
As for proving that a particular implementation is quicksort: Yes, non-trivial. That's irrelevant for the point, which you can accept now, and accept that you are behaving as an ass, instead of actually chosing to LEARN NOW. I understand that you're pissed at yourself for being wrong; take it out in energy to LEARN NOW, and let the phase where you argued against new knowledge fall behind you.
Eivind.
Eivind.
"Dating" is a US anti-sex custom related to the introduction of the box-on-wheels y'all love so much. That custom is, sadly, also spreading with americanized culture. Fortunately, it is under attack in the US itself, and will hopefully die shortly.
I'd just like to say Thank you! for taking the time to do informative posts.
Revolution needs much fewer people - I don't think that's realistic, either, though.
Eivind.
Perspective changing view!
Eivind.
Irony, n: Somewhat like iron. See Goldy, Silvery.
What beats me is that the effect is present for males as well as females. You'd think that living permanently would be a good idea for males (who stay reproductive, and have little strain from reproduction).
Eivind.
Eivind.
DragonflyBSD is a message passing/microkernel refactor of FreeBSD, using kernel threads for "everything".
And DragonflyBSD could definately get better SMP support faster than FreeBSD, and I would expect NetBSD and OpenBSD. Dragonfly had (and to a degree has) the luxury of not having that many users and developers, and being able to mess up things and fix them again. FreeBSD has much less of that privilege, and as a such development speed is slower. (There's also much more communication overhead in FreeBSD, and "competing" internal projects.)
Eivind.
I've never done what might be termed "complete XP", though I've adapted as many elements of it as has been possible to push into the situations I've been in (pair programming, test first, cut down time, minimize planning, estimation habits ++), and that's worked very well. I've got reason to believe the rest of the practices support this (from 20+ years of experience with programming projects), but I've not tested them all together.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Because I can't believe anybody can conclude, after having tried XP, that it is completely useless in the real world in all cases. There are cases where it is a good fit - many cases - and there are some where it is a bad fit, but after having taken the risk of actually testing it, it's clear that it is tremendously useful in the right context.
Have you actually tried XP? Because to me, what you write sounds like somebody that hasn't tried it, and just feel that this can't work, and passive-aggressively accuses those that have tried it and found it to work of being passive-aggressive ;)
Eivind.
Have you noticed the "with snacks" meme that is going around everywhere in XP? "We don't know why, but this works much better when there are snack available in reach of the programmers." This one is true, in my experience. Pair programming work much better with it in place...
Eivind.
I also found vi to be harder to learn than emacs; I just find that it has more "UI depth". Not programming hack depth (elisp is rich), but user interface depth. The more I learn vi, the more things transparently just happen - quickly. I never got that "totally out of the way" feeling from emacs...