I think you just have to accept Word's grammar checker for what it is. I find that its main value is in encouraging me to make sure that I know why I broke that particular style rule. (It's not like a compiler where you generally want to clean up the code to eliminate all warnings.) I often use the passive without thinking about it. But any decision I make without knowing why I made that decision is not a free decision, and is quite possibly not a good decision either.
As someone else already pointed out, you could say "The window broke." If you wanted to stress that windows don't just break on their own, you would say "Someone broke the window." Or you could say "The window has been broken for 3 weeks" if the length of time was your emphasis. In that case you are using the passive for a reason. (I only said it is Evil(TM), not that you should never use it.) It all depends on context.
I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.
You can turn this off you know. If I had MS Word installed on this machine I'd tell you how, but I don't think it is too obscure.
Personally, I find the grammer checker quite useful and I believe that the passive voice is Evil(TM). Most people who use passive seem to believe that they need to in order to take the focus away from the person doing the action, and that this is particularly important in scientific publications etc.
All I can say in response is that there are a great many almost unreadable scientific papers out there that are over-wordy, constructed portacabin-like from pre-fabricated sentences, which contain nothing to keep the reader engaged. If that is the price of using the passive voice, then I don't think it is worth paying.
Can I recommend you take a look at George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language? Although written in 1946, he still has a lot that is relevant to say about writing clear and engaging english. (Sorry, I've gone off the original subject a little, but I think this essay should be required reading for anyone who does any kind of formal writing.)
Software Development Is not Like Engineering
on
Keeping the Lights On
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's probably worth mentioning a 'seminal' essay written by Jack W. Reeves that suggests that software development is fundamentally different to other engineering disciplines, because the construction phase costs essentially nothing. (He considers coding to be part of the design.) Well worth a read (although it's no excuse for the complete absense of documentation).
Regarding the above analogy, the engineer jumping on the lathe is analagous to the software developer hitting the compile button. And so the analogy breaks down.
To be fair, my car has the same light, but it seems to make no difference whether I wait for it to go out or not. I can confirm though that the glow plugs don't come on when you unlock the door (not in the Renault anyway).
Basically, I think common rail diesels don't need to heat up the cylinder, but I'm no expert.
They've been fixed. No longer do modern diesels have to heat up the cylinder block before they can start. The 1.5 dCi engine of my 4 year old Renault Clio starts as soon as I insert the key even on the coldest day of winter. On my regular 7 mile commute to work, I get 68 miles to the (UK) gallon, which is pretty much on par with the official figures for the car. (I don't call that 'very inefficient'.)
I think you are about 10 years out of date. Here in the UK, I drive a Renault Clio 1.5 dCi (diesel). There is no delay starting the engine from cold, even on the coldest winter days. Technology has moved forwards.
I'm not sure where you get your figures from. I work in the electricity power industry, and as a rule of thumb, a coal-fired plant operator will be doing very well indeed if they manage to get 35% efficiency out of it. 32-33% is more usual. I suspect you missed out the thermal efficiency of converting heat to motion, where you are limited by thermodynamics to approx 50% (off the top of my head). Of course, that's still much better than an internal combustion engine, so your not wrong in your conclusion.
A combined-cycle gas turbine by contrast can get close to 60% if I remember correctly. (But I think you were talking about open-cycle which is indeed very inefficient.)
If I was at work right now, I could check these figures, but I don't think they are too far out.
Incidently, here in the UK, it is the CCGTs (and nukes) that provide the base load. CCGTs are actually very poor at load-following because they have little stored energy to draw on. A coal plant on the other hand can ramp up load very quickly just by opening up the steam valves. The pressure starts to drop in the boiler, but there's plenty of time to increase the firing rate before it becomes a problem. Most load-following and two-shifting is now done by coal.
(One other point - of the 550MW of a typical unit, 50MW of that is lost to power auxiliary plant - a bit more than a few conveyor belts and lights. The feedwater pump on its own is responsible for a significant portion of that.)
The cheeapass They HAVE the money to buy whatever they want but why pay for it when it is free. If it was not free they would have bought it.
I think the original poster's point was that this category is vanishingly small. Or to put it another way, people who are willing to pay for content will do so.
In my admittedly very limited experience of CMSs, Mambo tends to look like Mambo, WordPress looks like WordPress, etc. They are all customisable, but beyond the simple stuff it is quite a steep learning curve.
It seems like more work to learn and customise an existing CMS than it is to roll your own, developing it over time to meet your specific requirements, especially if you have a mix of static and dynamic content, the static content comes first, and you are already very familiar with XHTML and CSS.
Of course, if you just want a website that looks like a CMS, the above won't concern you. But if your design differs in structure (not necessarily things like layout, fonts and colours, which can usually be set up in templates) from the CMS default, expect a lot of customisation.
There's no real excuse for fixed-width columns now. The following CSS produces variable width up to an upper limit proportional to the font size in all browsers that support it, with a fall-back for IE.
div#contents {
margin: 0 auto;
max-width: 48em;
min-width: 12em; } * html div#contents {
width: 48em;/* for IE */ }
If you want to support IE as well, a simple bit of JavaScript will do the trick. See this site for an example.
In the case of beverage containers, it makes sense to collect and refund a deposit from the consumer, because the choice point occurs at the moment the container becomes empty.
Actually, the real choice point occurs much earlier than that, when the consumer decides to buy the bottle in the first place.
Similarly with computers, there is a choice by the consumer in deciding to junk the old computer and buy a new one. The real way to cut down on electronic waste is to upgrade less often. That's not an argument that the manufacturers should not be involved in a recycling tax; merely that the tax should be significant and should make the consumer think hard about whether they really need a new computer.
The first one was very roughly "Eat stuff that grows on trees - but not that one!". This is why so many Christians, keeping to a literal reading of the KJV, are Vegans.
Interestingly, just a little later on (after the flood), God says "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." - Genesis 9:3.
Then you are simply wrong. I am both against spam and against collateral damage. You cannot argue with this - I know my own mind. I am sorry if I do not fit into your black-and-white world.
Don't worry - I'm not after your sympathy. What I am after is a reliable email service. One that doesn't treat collateral damage as an acceptable cost of spam, and that doesn't force me to change my email address due to someone else's incompetence (either sending or failing to stop spam).
But the problem is that I can't take my email address with me. That means that if I want all non-spam emails to reach me I'm no better off switching ISP than staying with one that blocks emails originating from SPEWS-listed servers.
It's all part of the same problem. In my view, spam is evil and collateral damage is more evil still.
And when you get down to numerical computation, including parallel computers, the optimization is done at a very low level, where the language syntax is irrelevant.
I can't let you get away with that. Fortran was designed to have a language syntax and structure that makes compiler optimisation easy. 'WHERE' loops can be parallelised, pointer aliasing is tightly controlled (unlike C/C++), etc. It does make a difference.
I like that one. A variation is to create a desktop picture that contains many, many icons. Then see how long it takes to find the real icons among them.
Another (rather subtle) one is to swap over the monitor, keyboard, and mouse connections of adjacent pairs of Macs in a lab. Everything appears to work as normal until you put a disk in and it appears on your neighbour's desktop... (Obviously, this works rather less well in Windows.)
people who need to tell me something know to use the phone.
It is a question of choice.
What if your telephone company suddenly decided to block all calls made to your telephone that originated from area codes listed on a certain blacklist, and they didn't tell you?
NTL in the UK started using SORBS in November 2004. Since I administer my Church's web site (the sender ISP) and am also a customer of NTL, I am in a similar position to you.
But I've just been met with stonewalling by NTL. It took a considerable effort just to make them admit that they use SORBS. The full story is on my website.
Unfortunately, in the real world that doesn't work.
1. Stop spamming or clean up your network (if applicable)
Ok, so it was a customer who sent the spam. He was stupid enough to send 3 emails to SORBS spam trap addresses and you are now blacklisted. It took him precisely 50ms to do this. How do you propose 'cleaning up your network' to prevent this sort of thing happening?
2. When you have fixed your problem, politely ask the blacklist to update your listing... and then wait while they ignore your request, or demand a $50 'fine'.
3. If you really encounter dead ends, then ask sites using the blacklist to discontinue their use of the list.
This only works if you are a customer of the blacklist user ISP, and then only if a very large proportion of the other customers are also up in arms. (But how many ISPs even make public which RBLs they use?)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you just have to accept Word's grammar checker for what it is. I find that its main value is in encouraging me to make sure that I know why I broke that particular style rule. (It's not like a compiler where you generally want to clean up the code to eliminate all warnings.) I often use the passive without thinking about it. But any decision I make without knowing why I made that decision is not a free decision, and is quite possibly not a good decision either.
As someone else already pointed out, you could say "The window broke." If you wanted to stress that windows don't just break on their own, you would say "Someone broke the window." Or you could say "The window has been broken for 3 weeks" if the length of time was your emphasis. In that case you are using the passive for a reason. (I only said it is Evil(TM), not that you should never use it.) It all depends on context.
I hate it whenever Word tries to encourage me not to use passive.
You can turn this off you know. If I had MS Word installed on this machine I'd tell you how, but I don't think it is too obscure.
Personally, I find the grammer checker quite useful and I believe that the passive voice is Evil(TM). Most people who use passive seem to believe that they need to in order to take the focus away from the person doing the action, and that this is particularly important in scientific publications etc.
All I can say in response is that there are a great many almost unreadable scientific papers out there that are over-wordy, constructed portacabin-like from pre-fabricated sentences, which contain nothing to keep the reader engaged. If that is the price of using the passive voice, then I don't think it is worth paying.
Can I recommend you take a look at George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language ? Although written in 1946, he still has a lot that is relevant to say about writing clear and engaging english. (Sorry, I've gone off the original subject a little, but I think this essay should be required reading for anyone who does any kind of formal writing.)
It's probably worth mentioning a 'seminal' essay written by Jack W. Reeves that suggests that software development is fundamentally different to other engineering disciplines, because the construction phase costs essentially nothing. (He considers coding to be part of the design.) Well worth a read (although it's no excuse for the complete absense of documentation).
Regarding the above analogy, the engineer jumping on the lathe is analagous to the software developer hitting the compile button. And so the analogy breaks down.
Code as Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves.
So what is the minimum speed CPU you need to see a speed advantage running Reiser4?
(I know it depends on usage, disk speed, etc, but are we talking 75MHz, 750MHz, or into the GHz range?)
To be fair, my car has the same light, but it seems to make no difference whether I wait for it to go out or not. I can confirm though that the glow plugs don't come on when you unlock the door (not in the Renault anyway).
Basically, I think common rail diesels don't need to heat up the cylinder, but I'm no expert.
They've been fixed. No longer do modern diesels have to heat up the cylinder block before they can start. The 1.5 dCi engine of my 4 year old Renault Clio starts as soon as I insert the key even on the coldest day of winter. On my regular 7 mile commute to work, I get 68 miles to the (UK) gallon, which is pretty much on par with the official figures for the car. (I don't call that 'very inefficient'.)
I think you are about 10 years out of date. Here in the UK, I drive a Renault Clio 1.5 dCi (diesel). There is no delay starting the engine from cold, even on the coldest winter days. Technology has moved forwards.
I'm not sure where you get your figures from. I work in the electricity power industry, and as a rule of thumb, a coal-fired plant operator will be doing very well indeed if they manage to get 35% efficiency out of it. 32-33% is more usual. I suspect you missed out the thermal efficiency of converting heat to motion, where you are limited by thermodynamics to approx 50% (off the top of my head). Of course, that's still much better than an internal combustion engine, so your not wrong in your conclusion.
A combined-cycle gas turbine by contrast can get close to 60% if I remember correctly. (But I think you were talking about open-cycle which is indeed very inefficient.)
If I was at work right now, I could check these figures, but I don't think they are too far out.
Incidently, here in the UK, it is the CCGTs (and nukes) that provide the base load. CCGTs are actually very poor at load-following because they have little stored energy to draw on. A coal plant on the other hand can ramp up load very quickly just by opening up the steam valves. The pressure starts to drop in the boiler, but there's plenty of time to increase the firing rate before it becomes a problem. Most load-following and two-shifting is now done by coal.
(One other point - of the 550MW of a typical unit, 50MW of that is lost to power auxiliary plant - a bit more than a few conveyor belts and lights. The feedwater pump on its own is responsible for a significant portion of that.)
I would say you forgot one catagory
The cheeapass
They HAVE the money to buy whatever they want but why pay for it when it is free. If it was not free they would have bought it.
I think the original poster's point was that this category is vanishingly small. Or to put it another way, people who are willing to pay for content will do so.
In my admittedly very limited experience of CMSs, Mambo tends to look like Mambo, WordPress looks like WordPress, etc. They are all customisable, but beyond the simple stuff it is quite a steep learning curve.
It seems like more work to learn and customise an existing CMS than it is to roll your own, developing it over time to meet your specific requirements, especially if you have a mix of static and dynamic content, the static content comes first, and you are already very familiar with XHTML and CSS.
Of course, if you just want a website that looks like a CMS, the above won't concern you. But if your design differs in structure (not necessarily things like layout, fonts and colours, which can usually be set up in templates) from the CMS default, expect a lot of customisation.
There's no real excuse for fixed-width columns now. The following CSS produces variable width up to an upper limit proportional to the font size in all browsers that support it, with a fall-back for IE.
/* for IE */ }
div#contents {
margin: 0 auto;
max-width: 48em;
min-width: 12em; }
* html div#contents {
width: 48em;
If you want to support IE as well, a simple bit of JavaScript will do the trick. See this site for an example.
In the case of beverage containers, it makes sense to collect and refund a deposit from the consumer, because the choice point occurs at the moment the container becomes empty.
Actually, the real choice point occurs much earlier than that, when the consumer decides to buy the bottle in the first place.
Similarly with computers, there is a choice by the consumer in deciding to junk the old computer and buy a new one. The real way to cut down on electronic waste is to upgrade less often. That's not an argument that the manufacturers should not be involved in a recycling tax; merely that the tax should be significant and should make the consumer think hard about whether they really need a new computer.
You missed an option:
4. If Christians are right, we are custodians of the earth and responsible for looking after it properly until Jesus returns.
The first one was very roughly "Eat stuff that grows on trees - but not that one!". This is why so many Christians, keeping to a literal reading of the KJV, are Vegans.
Interestingly, just a little later on (after the flood), God says "Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things." - Genesis 9:3.
I guess that we Christians are generally just a bit more skeptical than those gullible atheists ;-)
Then you are simply wrong. I am both against spam and against collateral damage. You cannot argue with this - I know my own mind. I am sorry if I do not fit into your black-and-white world.
Don't worry - I'm not after your sympathy. What I am after is a reliable email service. One that doesn't treat collateral damage as an acceptable cost of spam, and that doesn't force me to change my email address due to someone else's incompetence (either sending or failing to stop spam).
Of course you can bail out.
But the problem is that I can't take my email address with me. That means that if I want all non-spam emails to reach me I'm no better off switching ISP than staying with one that blocks emails originating from SPEWS-listed servers.
It's all part of the same problem. In my view, spam is evil and collateral damage is more evil still.
If you are a customer of the offending ISP, you either convince them to do #1 above, or leave them.
and therein lies the problem... The people who are hurt most have no real power.
And when you get down to numerical computation, including parallel computers, the optimization is done at a very low level, where the language syntax is irrelevant.
I can't let you get away with that. Fortran was designed to have a language syntax and structure that makes compiler optimisation easy. 'WHERE' loops can be parallelised, pointer aliasing is tightly controlled (unlike C/C++), etc. It does make a difference.
I like that one. A variation is to create a desktop picture that contains many, many icons. Then see how long it takes to find the real icons among them.
Another (rather subtle) one is to swap over the monitor, keyboard, and mouse connections of adjacent pairs of Macs in a lab. Everything appears to work as normal until you put a disk in and it appears on your neighbour's desktop... (Obviously, this works rather less well in Windows.)
people who need to tell me something know to use the phone.
It is a question of choice.
What if your telephone company suddenly decided to block all calls made to your telephone that originated from area codes listed on a certain blacklist, and they didn't tell you?
It sounds like you got off lightly.
NTL in the UK started using SORBS in November 2004. Since I administer my Church's web site (the sender ISP) and am also a customer of NTL, I am in a similar position to you.
But I've just been met with stonewalling by NTL. It took a considerable effort just to make them admit that they use SORBS. The full story is on my website.
Unfortunately, in the real world that doesn't work.
... and then wait while they ignore your request, or demand a $50 'fine'.
1. Stop spamming or clean up your network (if applicable)
Ok, so it was a customer who sent the spam. He was stupid enough to send 3 emails to SORBS spam trap addresses and you are now blacklisted. It took him precisely 50ms to do this. How do you propose 'cleaning up your network' to prevent this sort of thing happening?
2. When you have fixed your problem, politely ask the blacklist to update your listing
3. If you really encounter dead ends, then ask sites using the blacklist to discontinue their use of the list.
This only works if you are a customer of the blacklist user ISP, and then only if a very large proportion of the other customers are also up in arms. (But how many ISPs even make public which RBLs they use?)