in fact, I think it would be highly inefficient to have an entire software project done by only software engineers. It would be an inefficient use of resources to do so. That would be like hiring mechanical engineers to build cars.
No, that would be like hiring mechanical engineers to design the cars. The construction of software is done by tools like make, ant, and compilers.
I think that programmers should start calling for management to be opened up to people who don't understand how to manage. oh, wait...
Submission to a standards organization does not open a patent. Some organizations will not accept a technology as a standard if it is patent encumbered. I don't believe that to be the case with ECMA. Note that they didn't submit to IEEE or ANSI.
The research probably was doing a search on Monster.com and seeing how many "jobs" cames up
I use Dice as my "hot technology" meter. It is currently listing 10724.Net hits and 14413 Java hits.
Monster doesn't, at least for me, list hit counts greater than 1000, so I restricted the search to within 5 miles of my zip code. 201 Java hits, 78.Net hits.
Specifically, what percentage of their submissions get accepted. You might have to add some code to retain submission stats, but it should quiet the conspiracy buffs... oh, wait, they'll just say you faked the number.
The next step is to do away with the models and know exactly what it is that we are measuring
I think you misunderstand modeling. Take a brick. The very act of measuring the length of the brick involves modeling. Most of us use a very simple model that we learned in elementary school: length, height, width, volume. length > width; width > height; volume = length * width * height.
But the brick doesn't have these simple dimensions. Look closely and you will see that the brick has rough edges. Our simple model of an ideal rectangular solid doesn't capture all of the details of our brick. I would go so far as to say that the brick doesn't have length, only our model of the brick does. Indeed, this discussion is actually about a model brick because like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two bricks are alike. So talking about bricks requires that we all share some mental model of what a brick is.
For an introduction to some of the difficulties of measurement, see Mandelbrot's description of the lenght of coasts in "The Fractal Geometry of Nature."
Motivated people will "do what it takes" to get the job done.
Yeah, and it is one of the jobs of a good manager to make sure that people don't burn themselves out. There is at least a little of the hero in all of us, but a boss who lets folks work beyond their normal bandwidth for very long is a fool.
I have never met anyone who could sustain their creativity working much more than 40hrs/week for long periods. It seems to me that the limit is about 6 weeks in cruch mode. After that you may be present, but you are nowhere near as effective as normal. And even after a 6 week crunch, you have to pay back the extra productivity with what DeMarco calls 'undertime.'
Re:What is .Net's competition?
on
Ruby Off the Rails
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
.Net doesn't have competition in this arena because it is propriatry. MS has so throughly closed their environment that every would-be Matz will develop on Linux, where there are no taxes to pay to the corporate overlords and no "defend the monopoly" landmines.
It seems to me that MS is in a position where they will forever be chasing the leaders in language development.
So how can it be "sad" if the people who believe in the Jesus, Hail Mary Mother Ghost of Alah or whatever, are happy believing in such?
If people's faith gives them solace and makes them better hunman beings, I'm all for it. When people's faith requires them to invade science classrooms and destroy biology instruction, I get concerned. The politically active evangelical right, for reasons I don't understand, needs to feel as if the world were out to get them, despite their enormous political power.
Biologists don't try to change Sunday school, but evangelicals regularly try to change biology.
Believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster if you like, but don't burn down any Italian restaurants.
They do not have the right to tax sales between states, or impose taxation laws regarding such sales.
You have this exactly wrong. Article 1, section 8 of the constitution says:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
... and...
"To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
So you see that the Feds can indeed imposes a sales tax on interstate e-commerce (the states already tax in-state e-commerce). It appears, though, that they cannot impose different taxes on different regions.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights;
Wow, another wiki gets it wrong! Jefferson actually wrote "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." from the the national archives
MS isn't getting the retail price, they are getting a wholesale price. Isn't retail markup usually in the 100% range? So MS is losing more like $325 per unit.
While hybrids are essentially conventional vehicles at high-speeds,...
Not quite. I've been drive an 05 Prius for about a month now, and watching what the power train is doing has made me as sensitive to hills as I am on a bicycle. At 60 on a downhill, the engine sometimes cuts off and the battery assist is sufficient to maintain speed.
Starting on level ground, the engine doesn't come on until I'm doing 15 (if nobody is behind me. If I'm in typical commuter traffic, it is polite to accelerate faster than the battery alone can). Starting on an uphill, the engine comes on immediately.
It is really a lot of fun to watch the engine & battery do their on & off dance. By the way, I get better mileage on highway driving. I get somewhere in the low 30 in neighborhood driving and somewhere around 60 on divided highways. 46 overall.
The pending doom of American science has very little to do with our political climate.
From TFA The panel cited many examples:
Last year, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, compared to 350,000 in India and 70,000 in the United States.
Recently, American 12th graders performed below the international average for 21 countries on general knowledge in math and science.
The cost of employing one chemist or engineer in the United States is equal to about five chemists in China and 11 engineers in India.
Chemical companies last year shut 70 facilities in the United States and marked 40 for closure. Of 120 large chemical plants under construction globally, one is in the United States and 50 are in China.
This relates to the political climate because it has been the policy of the US to flatten all trade barriers everywhere. It has been most successful where it has been easiest: removing barriers to imports into the US. They are almost all gone (except for agriculture), so scientific and engineering jobs are leaving the US. Smart kids know the jobs are leaving and so, except for personal satisfaction, there are no rewards for studying science and math.
This is the direct result of the WTO and its predecessor, GATT. And both WTO and GATT were creations of US policy.
We are held in thrall to economic theories that will, ultimately, cause the US economy to implode. For an example of what that looks like, see the recent collapse of the Argentine economy. (by the way, the US trade deficit for August was $59 billion. It hasn't been less than $50 billion, even one month, since Spring of 04)
Blaming teachers or students or parents is just another wookie. When science is rewarded like poetry is rewarded, we will have as many good scientists as we have good poets.
RTFA. Lucent developed something on top of the patent. Lucent offered the inventors 100K$ royalty for 1000 of the things that Lucent developed. The inventors refused, sued, and started supoening documents. That is when the Feds intervened. If the documents were classified (and most things about water-tight couplers for fiber optic cables are likely classified, then the inventors are just bone-stupid.)
Again from TFA, if the only customer for a device is the government, the device is immune from patent infringement litigation. (Congress writes the patent laws, so they can give themselves a break, I guess)
Only the term "irreducible complexity" is new. In fact, the problem troubled Darwin himself. He did not understand how something as wonderous as the human eye could arise from natural selection. But in the last decade or two, biologists have identified lots of intermediate forms from light sensitive spots on up.
That, however, is not sufficient to falsify ID. The ID proponents have abandoned the eye example and retreated to the truely silly, and more difficult to falsify. The two examples of ID that I have heard most recently are 1) how could something as complex as cillia on bacteria have evolved, and 2) how could certain complex biochemical reaction chains have evolved. Note that these are both obscure and hard to identify intermediate forms, even if they once existed.
The strongest, for me, argument against ID is that it argues that because I don't undestand something, God must have done it. I don't find professions of ignorance and surrender to be compelling arguments.
The next strongest argument against ID is that it seems to me to argue that God is weak. God could not possibly have set the universe in motion in such a way that humans would arise without periodic intervention. ID seems to demand a God who needs mid-course corrections, and who is comprehensible to human minds. Neither condition matches my concept of God.
I'm not saying that it's a mistake to involve society at large in a matter like this, but experts' opinions are going to be the most well-informed, and therefore the most valuable.
I guess you don't have a feel for the history of "expert's opinions" and where they lead: But the night of Dec. 2-3, 1949, was cloudier than expected, and the winds kept shifting. Calculations were off, and almost 8,000 curies of iodine 131 were released.
And soon afterward, rain and snow came to force the iodine particles down all over the inland Northwest. One follow-up iodine 131 reading on vegetation in Kennewick was almost 1,000 times the limit set at that time.link
Experts are in love with their cool new field. Experts are human. Experts will almost always exagerate the benefits and minimize the harm that their work will bring. Not evil, just human.
What went wrong? Maybe the whole idea of machine intelligence is wrong. Our brains are massively more complex than von Neumann machines are ever likely to be. And then there is the whole dimension of brain chemicals changing our moods, attention levels, etc.
Human beings have been using, and adapting ourselves to the use of, natural language for a very long time. It seems a little presumptious to assume that we could replicate our cognitive abilities with first generation computing machines.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that would be like hiring mechanical engineers to design the cars. The construction of software is done by tools like make, ant, and compilers.
I think that programmers should start calling for management to be opened up to people who don't understand how to manage.
oh, wait...
Submission to a standards organization does not open a patent. Some organizations will not accept a technology as a standard if it is patent encumbered. I don't believe that to be the case with ECMA. Note that they didn't submit to IEEE or ANSI.
I use Dice as my "hot technology" meter. It is currently listing 10724 .Net hits and 14413 Java hits.
Monster doesn't, at least for me, list hit counts greater than 1000, so I restricted the search to within 5 miles of my zip code. 201 Java hits, 78 .Net hits.
Admittedly an imperfect mirror, but...
statutory damages are $150,000 per copy
So if we don't have a perfect solution we should do nothing?
And you know what? I want all kids to be safe, but I'm responsible for mine.
Specifically, what percentage of their submissions get accepted. You might have to add some code to retain submission stats, but it should quiet the conspiracy buffs ... oh, wait, they'll just say you faked the number.
I think you misunderstand modeling. Take a brick. The very act of measuring the length of the brick involves modeling. Most of us use a very simple model that we learned in elementary school: length, height, width, volume. length > width; width > height; volume = length * width * height.
But the brick doesn't have these simple dimensions. Look closely and you will see that the brick has rough edges. Our simple model of an ideal rectangular solid doesn't capture all of the details of our brick. I would go so far as to say that the brick doesn't have length, only our model of the brick does. Indeed, this discussion is actually about a model brick because like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two bricks are alike. So talking about bricks requires that we all share some mental model of what a brick is.
For an introduction to some of the difficulties of measurement, see Mandelbrot's description of the lenght of coasts in "The Fractal Geometry of Nature."
Yeah, and it is one of the jobs of a good manager to make sure that people don't burn themselves out. There is at least a little of the hero in all of us, but a boss who lets folks work beyond their normal bandwidth for very long is a fool.
I have never met anyone who could sustain their creativity working much more than 40hrs/week for long periods. It seems to me that the limit is about 6 weeks in cruch mode. After that you may be present, but you are nowhere near as effective as normal. And even after a 6 week crunch, you have to pay back the extra productivity with what DeMarco calls 'undertime.'
The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hahn. He is a Vietnamese Buddhist, and founder of Plum Village
It seems to me that MS is in a position where they will forever be chasing the leaders in language development.
And so, out of your own mouth, you believe that all science is a waste of time, doomed to fail.
If people's faith gives them solace and makes them better hunman beings, I'm all for it. When people's faith requires them to invade science classrooms and destroy biology instruction, I get concerned. The politically active evangelical right, for reasons I don't understand, needs to feel as if the world were out to get them, despite their enormous political power.
Biologists don't try to change Sunday school, but evangelicals regularly try to change biology.
Believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster if you like, but don't burn down any Italian restaurants.
You have this exactly wrong. Article 1, section 8 of the constitution says:
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
"To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
So you see that the Feds can indeed imposes a sales tax on interstate e-commerce (the states already tax in-state e-commerce). It appears, though, that they cannot impose different taxes on different regions.
Wow, another wiki gets it wrong! Jefferson actually wrote "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." from the the national archives
God, Southerners have the coolest names.
MS isn't getting the retail price, they are getting a wholesale price. Isn't retail markup usually in the 100% range? So MS is losing more like $325 per unit.
Not quite. I've been drive an 05 Prius for about a month now, and watching what the power train is doing has made me as sensitive to hills as I am on a bicycle. At 60 on a downhill, the engine sometimes cuts off and the battery assist is sufficient to maintain speed.
Starting on level ground, the engine doesn't come on until I'm doing 15 (if nobody is behind me. If I'm in typical commuter traffic, it is polite to accelerate faster than the battery alone can). Starting on an uphill, the engine comes on immediately.
It is really a lot of fun to watch the engine & battery do their on & off dance. By the way, I get better mileage on highway driving. I get somewhere in the low 30 in neighborhood driving and somewhere around 60 on divided highways. 46 overall.
From TFA The panel cited many examples:
Last year, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, compared to 350,000 in India and 70,000 in the United States.
Recently, American 12th graders performed below the international average for 21 countries on general knowledge in math and science.
The cost of employing one chemist or engineer in the United States is equal to about five chemists in China and 11 engineers in India.
Chemical companies last year shut 70 facilities in the United States and marked 40 for closure. Of 120 large chemical plants under construction globally, one is in the United States and 50 are in China.
This relates to the political climate because it has been the policy of the US to flatten all trade barriers everywhere. It has been most successful where it has been easiest: removing barriers to imports into the US. They are almost all gone (except for agriculture), so scientific and engineering jobs are leaving the US. Smart kids know the jobs are leaving and so, except for personal satisfaction, there are no rewards for studying science and math.
This is the direct result of the WTO and its predecessor, GATT. And both WTO and GATT were creations of US policy.
We are held in thrall to economic theories that will, ultimately, cause the US economy to implode. For an example of what that looks like, see the recent collapse of the Argentine economy. (by the way, the US trade deficit for August was $59 billion. It hasn't been less than $50 billion, even one month, since Spring of 04)
Blaming teachers or students or parents is just another wookie. When science is rewarded like poetry is rewarded, we will have as many good scientists as we have good poets.
Again from TFA, if the only customer for a device is the government, the device is immune from patent infringement litigation. (Congress writes the patent laws, so they can give themselves a break, I guess)
That, however, is not sufficient to falsify ID. The ID proponents have abandoned the eye example and retreated to the truely silly, and more difficult to falsify. The two examples of ID that I have heard most recently are 1) how could something as complex as cillia on bacteria have evolved, and 2) how could certain complex biochemical reaction chains have evolved. Note that these are both obscure and hard to identify intermediate forms, even if they once existed.
The strongest, for me, argument against ID is that it argues that because I don't undestand something, God must have done it. I don't find professions of ignorance and surrender to be compelling arguments.
The next strongest argument against ID is that it seems to me to argue that God is weak. God could not possibly have set the universe in motion in such a way that humans would arise without periodic intervention. ID seems to demand a God who needs mid-course corrections, and who is comprehensible to human minds. Neither condition matches my concept of God.
The next time someone calls Gates a technical genius, remember this quote.
well, sort of by definition, people can't go extinct in your lifetime.
I guess you don't have a feel for the history of "expert's opinions" and where they lead: But the night of Dec. 2-3, 1949, was cloudier than expected, and the winds kept shifting. Calculations were off, and almost 8,000 curies of iodine 131 were released. And soon afterward, rain and snow came to force the iodine particles down all over the inland Northwest. One follow-up iodine 131 reading on vegetation in Kennewick was almost 1,000 times the limit set at that time. link
Experts are in love with their cool new field. Experts are human. Experts will almost always exagerate the benefits and minimize the harm that their work will bring. Not evil, just human.
But experts are not to be trusted.
Make costs $35 a year. Use the $65 left to build a couple of projects.
Human beings have been using, and adapting ourselves to the use of, natural language for a very long time. It seems a little presumptious to assume that we could replicate our cognitive abilities with first generation computing machines.