OK, tell me I'm a moron if you want, but how in the heck to you build and run anything from the Eclipse environment?
I downloaded the whole thing and I downloaded the samples/examples, and I can't make heads or tails of their friggin menus -- that darn thing is worse than Word!
Shouldn't I be able to do something like Files Open (or perhaps Files Open Project), browse to a directory called "samples" or "demos", open one of the projects, build it, and tell it to run (this is an IDE, isn't it?), and it should run the friggin program. I can then browse the source code of that program and see how the do stuff -- like a GUI button or text box, and then write my own programs.
Yeah, yeah, I browsed their help, and you are supposed to drill down into menus with non-standard names (what happened to Files Open?), and then you can set a bunch of options, you can import the examples and UNZIP them, and then you can specify a whole bunch of "jar" files you are supposed to add to your project to get at the necessary Java classes to do neat stuff. The help file instructions run to pages of "click on this" and "activate this dialog" and "enter this field", and I tried following help, and I couldn't find the stuff that was supposed to be there, and as to the examples I did find, I got as far as building them, but I couldn't figure out what the heck I was supposed to specify to get anything to run.
I have used Delphi and I have used Microsoft VC++ and Code Warrior, but Eclipse has me completely stumped. Yeah, yeah, I could plow through their help and maybe in a couple of days of trying things I could get a sample program to build and run in Eclipse, but I got a whole bunch of other stuff to do.
Am I the only person out there who finds Eclipse opaque? Does someone have any helpful advice on how to get started with the thing?
The reason 'Kahn is head and shoulders above any other Star Trek, movie or TV, classic or NG, is that Kirk is so down-to-earth.
He takes a ship out with a training crew, doesn't follow Mr. Savik (Kirstie Allie's) advice about raising deflectors when the Grissom doesn't respond and gets the guts tore out of the Enterprise. We then find that the Federation has some kind of gadget they shouldn't be messing with, and the designer is the progeny of Kirks chronic "fooling-around" having caught up with him, who is as bloody-minded as the old-man Kirk himself. And to straighten out the whole mess, Kirk ends up sacrificing his best friend Spock.
This thing with Kahn is sort of like Bush and Saddam -- we know that Kahn is crazy, but if you think about it, Kahn has some legitimate grievances that Kirk has on his conscience.
There is no other Star Trek that gives that level of character development to either Kirk or Kirk's nemesis.
On the subject of the decline of Trek, the technobable bugs me the worst -- I saw this promo piece with Levar Burton explaining that they write "technobable" as a line in the script to call on a consultant to fill something in.
Classic Trek didn't have techno-babble. Enterprise would get enveloped with some kind of multi-color thing, Kirk would bark "Spock, what is that?" and Spock would stare into his science station Tektronix terminal hood and say "I don't know, it isn't registering on our sensors." Compared to NG, Classic Trek was high concept -- they wouldn't try to explain it like one shouldn't try to explain the Monolith in 2001.
As a matter of fact, we do all drive the same car
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Inside Ximian
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From a user-interface standpoint, we all pretty much drive the same car -- steering wheel, brake pedal, gas, turn signals.
In fact, when designers try to make cars too cute -- the used Camry I just bought has turn-signal style stalks sprouting out every which way from the steering column -- I get my wife operating the wipers every time she wants to put the car in gear, even though she once drove a Firebird with the gear selector on the console instead of on the tree like our old Taurus and Chrysler.
And when designers try and enhance things -- like the VW/Audi change in gas and brake pedal placement to get quicker brake reaction time -- you end up with geezers making new doors in the garage and turning around and suing for "stuck accelerator syndrome."
Do you have any suggestions as to lightweight relational tools (like keyed lists) (lightweight as in don't have to pay royalties for Oracle or whatever)? Are there collections in C++ STL that you like? Anything else?
C'mon, everyone with any education in the classical world knew the Earth to be a sphere. The controversy was about not having Earth at the center of things -- you know, the Copernican/Galilean/Keplerian cosmology.
"Q: Will or can SWT be enhanced to include support for JavaBeans?
A: To the extent that it makes sense, given the constraints of operating system compatibility, SWT already mirrors the beans behavior. An example of this is the use of standard beans mechanisms for event dispatch (EventListener, EventObject and adapter classes). Some aspects of the beans paradigm, such as the ability to create beans with null constructors, run counter to the constraints of the underlying operating systems that SWT runs on. For example, operating systems do not typically support creating a widget without specifying its parent.
The essence of the problem is that if you allow a widget to be created with a null constructor, then you can't actually create the o/s resources at the time the constructor runs (you would have to wait until later, after the parent has been set). We just can not do this, since we always create the o/s resources in the constructor, and for performance/efficiency/consistency reasons do not even keep slots in the object to hold whatever state would be required so that the object could be created later."
I think the word they are looking for is "no."
Used to take the carbon rods out of old batteries and run a rectified power supply through them.
Salt water gave a good sinus-stimulating snort of chlorine on one electrode -- it probably gave NaOH on the other electrode.
I believe that using bicarb as an electrolyte gave you H2 and O2. I tried to get enough H2 into a balloon to make an explosion (the whole reason for bathtub chemistry was making something that burned or some kind of firework, subject to the restrictions of what we could use. Never worked -- H2 is probably too diffusive a gas to collect that way. The standard way to generate H2 quickly enough to have enough to burn was to dump zinc into sulferic acid, but sulferic acid was not among the things we were allowed to have.
I wanted to get pure Na by electrolysis -- closest I came was I was going to fuse NaCl on an outdoor charcoal fire, but never got very far with that.
You are a well-known advocate as collections, especially associative or keyed collections as an alternative to OO.
But unless your collections are primitives in your language system, aren't object classes (or perhaps C++ templates) a proper way of managing that separation?
Zubrin had a crazier idea than Orion -- the nuclear salt water rocket.
The idea is that you would have a tank of water with uranium salt in solution along with enough boron so the thing would go off at once. You piped this salt water into a reactor chamber where you somehow extracted the boron so that you would get a nuclear chain reaction inside the chamber and then the super heated salt water would squirt out the back.
As somewhat less crazy idea is that you would entrain uranium hexafluoride gas in a vortex in a reactor and pump hydrogen through it -- kind of a look-Ma-no-walls version of NERVA.
Way I see it there are three approaches to nuclear propulsion: 1) Orion -- putty-putty bang-bang, 2) NERVA -- high power density reactor which heats up hydrogen that squirts out a conventional rocket nozzle, and 3) VASIMIR (Variable specific impulse magnetic rocket) -- use the nuclear reactor for an electric power station and accelerate hydrogen or other gas with a magnetic rocket nozzle (there is also ion drive, but VASIMIR is popular these days because it offers the greatest thrust of all the electric schemes).
The book, in talking the politics, indicated that NASA Huntsville though that Orion was pie-in-the-sky before doing something like NERVA first. VASIMIR is a more recent proposal and was not under consideration in that era.
My understanding is that NERVA would be a replacement 3rd stage to a Saturn V -- that way the reactor would not be turned on until you got into space. One thing about NERVA is that its propellant is stores as liquid hydrogen, which is one of the bulkiest, least dense liquids around. The NERVA stage would have been huge, essentially the same diameter as the S-IC and S-II rocket stages below it, making the nuclear Saturn V one continuous cylinder until you got to the payload fairing. Given the weight of the reactor and given the bulk of the hydrogen tank, I am wondering if the 800-second specific impulse compared to the 430-second specific impulse of the regular Saturn S-IVB upper stage would have been a wash.
Orion had a bulk problem too. If it was ground launched, if could have had a much bigger diameter pusher plate to capture more of the nuclear explosion and be more efficient (or perhaps less inefficient). Its efficiency came from the ultra-high temps of a nuclear blast compared to a sustained nuclear reactor and its inefficiency came from most of that efficiency being wasted apart from the little bit captured by the pusher plate, and the bigger the pusher plate the better.
I thought they said a ground launch Orion could be in the 10000-second specific impulse range while the Orion launched as a third stage of a Saturn V was reduced to about 2000-second specific impulse because of the smaller pusher plate -- you start getting into the is it worth the bother range.
I actually think that the Orion approach would be by far the easiest from the engineering standpoint, given how much work and testing went into bomb making. The only holdup is the idea of polluting even space let alone the Earth with that much fission fragments.
I have read your Web page with some interest. I do my GUI stuff with OO (the alternative is straight Windows API with the big switch statements). I see that it is no silver bullet -- there are the obscure errors relating to callbacks resulting from virtual functions, the blow-up from the null object reference, and the pain and agony of properly allocating and deallocating object references, which does not completely go away with GC.
Why do we subject ourselves to OO? I think what we are really after is indirection (pointers) in function calls. Objects are an attempt at a structured way of doing function pointers, which are potentially a scarier thing than the GOTO.
The classic deal is a numerical algorithm to optimize a function. How do we make it generic to allow optimizing different functions with the same algorithm? We could use a C++ template type of generic, and compile time generics is one path to take. Or we could have a polymorphic object with a virtual method EvalFunction(), and we could pass an object reference to the numerical algorithm to pass it different functions.
The GUI world needs to do gobs of function indirections in order to tie together mouse and widget. But even traditional inheritance OO proved cumbersome and hence the Java anonymous inner class, the even more atomistic C# delegate, or the Qt signal and slot.
Also the GUI world is hierarchical -- a form contains a widget group which contains a button widget -- which lends itself to the Composite pattern and a tree-graph of objects.
I was kind of expecting that Visual Studio.NET would be a lot like Delphi but it is more like a Microsoftized version of Delphi where they made the simple complicated.
For stuff like developing custom controls along with custom property editing, you can do pretty much anything in Delphi by overriding the correct object method. Finding what object method to override can require some searching, but once you figure it out it is clean and simple. Oh, and you look at the class framework source code if you are really stumped.
Once you get past the simple-minded Visual Basic style of programming and get into customizing the design-time behavior of controls for Visual Studio, the thing is a mess of attributes (runtime type info (RTTI) that are themselves objects) and classes you need to extend and plug into those attributes along with service providers, extender providers and gosh who knows what else. Who designed this thing? Did they put implants into Anders' brain?
I wonder how Borland is going to make some sense of this mess.
Yes its the money, but what the money buys is a bunch of campaign TV commercials, and we voters are dumb enough to base our vote on what we see on TV otherwise the money wouldn't figure in.
Menken said that democracy is the belief that the people should get the government they deserve -- and good and hard.
Oh, and a local TV station is a license to collect money from politicians -- network programming is a wash for them but campaign adds are their real cash cow. So if you want to influence politics by contributing to campaigns, you may as well give the money straight to the TV station.
Senator Russ Feingold is trying to require local TV stations to provide more open forum opportunities for third party and independant candidates. Yeah right, the local TV stations are going to give up their racket in the name of public interest. Modern politics is the art of shaking down the political activists (dupes with open check books) to give it to TV stations to tell moron voters whom to elect.
My dad had a wedding band made of paladium, which at the time was a cheap substitute for a gold band, but now I wish he could find the thing and pass it down, given the notoriety of paladium on account of everything from Fleischman and Pons to catalytic converters.
For much the same reason I would like to get my hands on one of those fluorescing,
seed-crystal-in-the-middle Russian synthetic diamonds, and the earlier production and more obvious the flaws the better. Gee, it would be like having one of Thomas Edisons first phonograph records.
Anyone know if there is a market or a way to buy one?
Similar approach used in speech synthesis
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Speaking in Tongues
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There is a similar issue in text-to-speech systems with regard to using larger units. Smaller units (phonemes) require much less memory storage but result in much more mechanical speech. Intermediate units would be diphones (like ha, pa, sa, tee, kee, ree), and larger units would be entire words or phrases -- each step is more natural sounding at the expense of much more memory, but memory is cheap so what the hey?
The classic example in language translation without language understanding is Jesus admonishment to his sleeping disciples (Jesus can't sleep because he knows he is about to be executed): "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." Jesus is essentially calling his disciples wusses for nodding off. A round trip to Russian and back supposedly put it as "The meat is rotten but the liquor is holding up." A phrasebook as comprehensive as Bartlet's would recognize this as a highly-quoted Bible passage and use the correct quote from the Bible in Croatian.
The correct translation of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" requires a great deal of context -- one needs to know that people in the Bible talk in symbols and metaphors all the time. The only way I even know what it means is that I remember that it is from the Bible, so for the computer to use a brute-force phrasebook without trying to understand what something means is not far off the mark -- I doubt most of us in the pews understand half of what is in the Bible anyway.
Spanish-sounding words with Finnish grammer. If you saw the movie Gattica, you heard Esperanto spoken on the PA system where the main character worked.
.NET is a lot of things to a lot of people, and for what I am interested in, it is a kind of super Visual Basic.
Visual Basic allows the great unwashed masses to develop what passes for applications (the look-and-feel of a number of applications written in it suggests there is some merit in the Slashdot consensus that programming needs a steeper learning curve). But for Visual Basic to work, you have to learn a programming language with the consistency of the user interface to Word, and while you can develop components for Visual Basic in almost any language, you are the mercy of Visual Studio wizards to navigate the incredible Rube Goldberg that is COM.
.NET/C# is to Java what Visual Basic is to Basic and what Delphi is to Object Pascal. Yeah, yeah, there is some IDE out there which probably allows the same thing in Java, but what makes.NET/C# not Java is the ability to have most of what Java is along with most of what Visual Basic is. Not only that, the.NET Visual Basic, C#, and thay bastard child of C++ (managed C++) are all interoperable, and you can develop widgets in C# or managed C++ and have them used in Visual Basic, all automagically transparent.
I am interested in the market for widgets for data acquistion and signal processing, which for better or worse is on the Microsoft plantation anyway (Data Translation has dropped support for Mac or anything other than Windows), and if this.NET thing lives up to its promise, there is no reason to be tied to stuff like LabView.
The drip, drip part is while Delphi 7 appears to be joining the.NET party, it is not clear to me how experimental/beta-test the.NET part is and if Delphi and COM is any guide, it may be Delphi 10 before Borland is done with dinking around with their.NET support to get it to their liking.
The Borland press release is also so mired in buzzwords that I am also afraid that Delphi is becoming this hodge podge (lets see, there is VCL, and then there is CLX, which is pointedly not VCL, and beyond that there are these wizards for generating ActiveX controls, which you should be able to generate from any VCL control but I have never gotten to work just right with any of my VCL controls, and now there is Diesel/DCCIL, which introduces a whole raft of deprecations of your existing code base which was the whole reason for sticking with Delphi in the first place).
Gilbert Levin developed the labeled release technique to assay bacteria in sewage-treatment plants. The labeled-release experiment was the controversial part of Viking and Levin has Web pages proclaiming that life had been detected, and if people are not so sure, he is telling us what experiment to fly next.
LR (labeled release) works by feeding the bugs radioactive food, which causes them to blow radioactive bathtub bubbles, which are in turn detected by a Geiger counter. It is supposed to work at much lower levels of bacteria and much more quickly than streaking culture plates and waiting for colonies to grow. One of the co-experiments on Viking involved some kind of mass-spec approach of burning up the soil to find organics. Levin claims that LR is much more sensitive than that approach, hence the difference in findings.
The conventional wisdom is that Levin's LR found some kind of chemical process - ultra violet-generated soil peroxides, although Levin claims that the supposed processes cannot be duplicated in labs that reproduce Mars conditions.
Levin has been pleading that someone fly Son of LR where there is a pair of LR's, each trying a different "handedness" of the nutrients. All life we know about only eats one particular variety of organic chemicals. It is kind of like feeding one tray Coke and the other Diet Coke, and the tray with Diet Coke should spit and say "blech, who ordered Diet?"
When all is done, I imagine that life will be found on Mars, and when it is, it will by dissappointingly similar to Earth life, scientists will theorize cross-contamination through meteors flying back and forth, and there will be no finding of an independant origin of life for which they will have to trek to Europa.
Are these sightings of the mysterious Aurora (a Brit aircraft-spotter hobbyist saw black triangle was seen in formation with F-111's and a tanker over a North Sea oil rig) which is supposed to be this hypersonic SR-71 replacement, or is this something else?
NAME: Anders Hejlsberg
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Turbo Pascal/Delphi
The Empire found a spot for him and now we have to wade through C#. I dare not imagine what Linus Torvalds inflict on us if he went over to the Dark Side.
Influence by Gilbert Levin, I predict that within our lifetimes, living procaryotic life will be discovered on Mars. I also predict that it will be similar to Earth-bound rock-living organisms, which will suggest a linkage of the Earth-Mars biosphere through meteorite fragments, but will be a profound disappointment regarding finding an independent origin of life.
In this same time scale, we will have space-based telescopes to find earth-sized planets within 100 light years and measure spectra to determine signs of at least primitive life.
The 600 gallons of gas is 25,000 kWHr at 100 percent conversion efficiency: the fuel processor/fuel cell system has maybe 40 percent efficiency; and advanced combined-cycle gas turbine could do 60 percent.
I think it is fair to compare dollars because the retail cost of electricity and fuel, taking efficiency into account, is about the same -- my Sun Belt sibs run their houses on about $150/month (lots of AC). Frost Belt me (with a lot of engineering expertise) runs a house on about $80/month -- $60/month for heat and hot water, $20/month for electric. So my sibs Sun Belt houses are at a 2-car equivalent while a reasonably energy-efficient Frost Belt house is perhaps a 1-car equivalent.
Slashdot Mirror
I downloaded the whole thing and I downloaded the samples/examples, and I can't make heads or tails of their friggin menus -- that darn thing is worse than Word!
Shouldn't I be able to do something like Files Open (or perhaps Files Open Project), browse to a directory called "samples" or "demos", open one of the projects, build it, and tell it to run (this is an IDE, isn't it?), and it should run the friggin program. I can then browse the source code of that program and see how the do stuff -- like a GUI button or text box, and then write my own programs.
Yeah, yeah, I browsed their help, and you are supposed to drill down into menus with non-standard names (what happened to Files Open?), and then you can set a bunch of options, you can import the examples and UNZIP them, and then you can specify a whole bunch of "jar" files you are supposed to add to your project to get at the necessary Java classes to do neat stuff. The help file instructions run to pages of "click on this" and "activate this dialog" and "enter this field", and I tried following help, and I couldn't find the stuff that was supposed to be there, and as to the examples I did find, I got as far as building them, but I couldn't figure out what the heck I was supposed to specify to get anything to run.
I have used Delphi and I have used Microsoft VC++ and Code Warrior, but Eclipse has me completely stumped. Yeah, yeah, I could plow through their help and maybe in a couple of days of trying things I could get a sample program to build and run in Eclipse, but I got a whole bunch of other stuff to do.
Am I the only person out there who finds Eclipse opaque? Does someone have any helpful advice on how to get started with the thing?
He takes a ship out with a training crew, doesn't follow Mr. Savik (Kirstie Allie's) advice about raising deflectors when the Grissom doesn't respond and gets the guts tore out of the Enterprise. We then find that the Federation has some kind of gadget they shouldn't be messing with, and the designer is the progeny of Kirks chronic "fooling-around" having caught up with him, who is as bloody-minded as the old-man Kirk himself. And to straighten out the whole mess, Kirk ends up sacrificing his best friend Spock.
This thing with Kahn is sort of like Bush and Saddam -- we know that Kahn is crazy, but if you think about it, Kahn has some legitimate grievances that Kirk has on his conscience.
There is no other Star Trek that gives that level of character development to either Kirk or Kirk's nemesis.
On the subject of the decline of Trek, the technobable bugs me the worst -- I saw this promo piece with Levar Burton explaining that they write "technobable" as a line in the script to call on a consultant to fill something in.
Classic Trek didn't have techno-babble. Enterprise would get enveloped with some kind of multi-color thing, Kirk would bark "Spock, what is that?" and Spock would stare into his science station Tektronix terminal hood and say "I don't know, it isn't registering on our sensors." Compared to NG, Classic Trek was high concept -- they wouldn't try to explain it like one shouldn't try to explain the Monolith in 2001.
From a user-interface standpoint, we all pretty much drive the same car -- steering wheel, brake pedal, gas, turn signals. In fact, when designers try to make cars too cute -- the used Camry I just bought has turn-signal style stalks sprouting out every which way from the steering column -- I get my wife operating the wipers every time she wants to put the car in gear, even though she once drove a Firebird with the gear selector on the console instead of on the tree like our old Taurus and Chrysler. And when designers try and enhance things -- like the VW/Audi change in gas and brake pedal placement to get quicker brake reaction time -- you end up with geezers making new doors in the garage and turning around and suing for "stuck accelerator syndrome."
Do you have any suggestions as to lightweight relational tools (like keyed lists) (lightweight as in don't have to pay royalties for Oracle or whatever)? Are there collections in C++ STL that you like? Anything else?
C'mon, everyone with any education in the classical world knew the Earth to be a sphere. The controversy was about not having Earth at the center of things -- you know, the Copernican/Galilean/Keplerian cosmology.
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/black_h ole_retrospective_000602.html
if you had forgotten about that Disney ur-classic "The Black Hole."
A: To the extent that it makes sense, given the constraints of operating system compatibility, SWT already mirrors the beans behavior. An example of this is the use of standard beans mechanisms for event dispatch (EventListener, EventObject and adapter classes). Some aspects of the beans paradigm, such as the ability to create beans with null constructors, run counter to the constraints of the underlying operating systems that SWT runs on. For example, operating systems do not typically support creating a widget without specifying its parent.
The essence of the problem is that if you allow a widget to be created with a null constructor, then you can't actually create the o/s resources at the time the constructor runs (you would have to wait until later, after the parent has been set). We just can not do this, since we always create the o/s resources in the constructor, and for performance/efficiency/consistency reasons do not even keep slots in the object to hold whatever state would be required so that the object could be created later." I think the word they are looking for is "no."
Salt water gave a good sinus-stimulating snort of chlorine on one electrode -- it probably gave NaOH on the other electrode.
I believe that using bicarb as an electrolyte gave you H2 and O2. I tried to get enough H2 into a balloon to make an explosion (the whole reason for bathtub chemistry was making something that burned or some kind of firework, subject to the restrictions of what we could use. Never worked -- H2 is probably too diffusive a gas to collect that way. The standard way to generate H2 quickly enough to have enough to burn was to dump zinc into sulferic acid, but sulferic acid was not among the things we were allowed to have.
I wanted to get pure Na by electrolysis -- closest I came was I was going to fuse NaCl on an outdoor charcoal fire, but never got very far with that.
You are a well-known advocate as collections, especially associative or keyed collections as an alternative to OO.
But unless your collections are primitives in your language system, aren't object classes (or perhaps C++ templates) a proper way of managing that separation?
The idea is that you would have a tank of water with uranium salt in solution along with enough boron so the thing would go off at once. You piped this salt water into a reactor chamber where you somehow extracted the boron so that you would get a nuclear chain reaction inside the chamber and then the super heated salt water would squirt out the back.
As somewhat less crazy idea is that you would entrain uranium hexafluoride gas in a vortex in a reactor and pump hydrogen through it -- kind of a look-Ma-no-walls version of NERVA.
Way I see it there are three approaches to nuclear propulsion: 1) Orion -- putty-putty bang-bang, 2) NERVA -- high power density reactor which heats up hydrogen that squirts out a conventional rocket nozzle, and 3) VASIMIR (Variable specific impulse magnetic rocket) -- use the nuclear reactor for an electric power station and accelerate hydrogen or other gas with a magnetic rocket nozzle (there is also ion drive, but VASIMIR is popular these days because it offers the greatest thrust of all the electric schemes). The book, in talking the politics, indicated that NASA Huntsville though that Orion was pie-in-the-sky before doing something like NERVA first. VASIMIR is a more recent proposal and was not under consideration in that era. My understanding is that NERVA would be a replacement 3rd stage to a Saturn V -- that way the reactor would not be turned on until you got into space. One thing about NERVA is that its propellant is stores as liquid hydrogen, which is one of the bulkiest, least dense liquids around. The NERVA stage would have been huge, essentially the same diameter as the S-IC and S-II rocket stages below it, making the nuclear Saturn V one continuous cylinder until you got to the payload fairing. Given the weight of the reactor and given the bulk of the hydrogen tank, I am wondering if the 800-second specific impulse compared to the 430-second specific impulse of the regular Saturn S-IVB upper stage would have been a wash. Orion had a bulk problem too. If it was ground launched, if could have had a much bigger diameter pusher plate to capture more of the nuclear explosion and be more efficient (or perhaps less inefficient). Its efficiency came from the ultra-high temps of a nuclear blast compared to a sustained nuclear reactor and its inefficiency came from most of that efficiency being wasted apart from the little bit captured by the pusher plate, and the bigger the pusher plate the better. I thought they said a ground launch Orion could be in the 10000-second specific impulse range while the Orion launched as a third stage of a Saturn V was reduced to about 2000-second specific impulse because of the smaller pusher plate -- you start getting into the is it worth the bother range. I actually think that the Orion approach would be by far the easiest from the engineering standpoint, given how much work and testing went into bomb making. The only holdup is the idea of polluting even space let alone the Earth with that much fission fragments.
Why do we subject ourselves to OO? I think what we are really after is indirection (pointers) in function calls. Objects are an attempt at a structured way of doing function pointers, which are potentially a scarier thing than the GOTO.
The classic deal is a numerical algorithm to optimize a function. How do we make it generic to allow optimizing different functions with the same algorithm? We could use a C++ template type of generic, and compile time generics is one path to take. Or we could have a polymorphic object with a virtual method EvalFunction(), and we could pass an object reference to the numerical algorithm to pass it different functions.
The GUI world needs to do gobs of function indirections in order to tie together mouse and widget. But even traditional inheritance OO proved cumbersome and hence the Java anonymous inner class, the even more atomistic C# delegate, or the Qt signal and slot.
Also the GUI world is hierarchical -- a form contains a widget group which contains a button widget -- which lends itself to the Composite pattern and a tree-graph of objects.
Are you sure you are not the architect of the RTTI/attribute system of the .NET class framework in Visual Studio?
For stuff like developing custom controls along with custom property editing, you can do pretty much anything in Delphi by overriding the correct object method. Finding what object method to override can require some searching, but once you figure it out it is clean and simple. Oh, and you look at the class framework source code if you are really stumped.
Once you get past the simple-minded Visual Basic style of programming and get into customizing the design-time behavior of controls for Visual Studio, the thing is a mess of attributes (runtime type info (RTTI) that are themselves objects) and classes you need to extend and plug into those attributes along with service providers, extender providers and gosh who knows what else. Who designed this thing? Did they put implants into Anders' brain?
I wonder how Borland is going to make some sense of this mess.
Menken said that democracy is the belief that the people should get the government they deserve -- and good and hard.
Oh, and a local TV station is a license to collect money from politicians -- network programming is a wash for them but campaign adds are their real cash cow. So if you want to influence politics by contributing to campaigns, you may as well give the money straight to the TV station.
Senator Russ Feingold is trying to require local TV stations to provide more open forum opportunities for third party and independant candidates. Yeah right, the local TV stations are going to give up their racket in the name of public interest. Modern politics is the art of shaking down the political activists (dupes with open check books) to give it to TV stations to tell moron voters whom to elect.
For much the same reason I would like to get my hands on one of those fluorescing, seed-crystal-in-the-middle Russian synthetic diamonds, and the earlier production and more obvious the flaws the better. Gee, it would be like having one of Thomas Edisons first phonograph records.
Anyone know if there is a market or a way to buy one?
The classic example in language translation without language understanding is Jesus admonishment to his sleeping disciples (Jesus can't sleep because he knows he is about to be executed): "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." Jesus is essentially calling his disciples wusses for nodding off. A round trip to Russian and back supposedly put it as "The meat is rotten but the liquor is holding up." A phrasebook as comprehensive as Bartlet's would recognize this as a highly-quoted Bible passage and use the correct quote from the Bible in Croatian.
The correct translation of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" requires a great deal of context -- one needs to know that people in the Bible talk in symbols and metaphors all the time. The only way I even know what it means is that I remember that it is from the Bible, so for the computer to use a brute-force phrasebook without trying to understand what something means is not far off the mark -- I doubt most of us in the pews understand half of what is in the Bible anyway.
Spanish-sounding words with Finnish grammer. If you saw the movie Gattica, you heard Esperanto spoken on the PA system where the main character worked.
Visual Basic allows the great unwashed masses to develop what passes for applications (the look-and-feel of a number of applications written in it suggests there is some merit in the Slashdot consensus that programming needs a steeper learning curve). But for Visual Basic to work, you have to learn a programming language with the consistency of the user interface to Word, and while you can develop components for Visual Basic in almost any language, you are the mercy of Visual Studio wizards to navigate the incredible Rube Goldberg that is COM.
I am interested in the market for widgets for data acquistion and signal processing, which for better or worse is on the Microsoft plantation anyway (Data Translation has dropped support for Mac or anything other than Windows), and if this .NET thing lives up to its promise, there is no reason to be tied to stuff like LabView.
The drip, drip part is while Delphi 7 appears to be joining the .NET party, it is not clear to me how experimental/beta-test the .NET part is and if Delphi and COM is any guide, it may be Delphi 10 before Borland is done with dinking around with their .NET support to get it to their liking.
The Borland press release is also so mired in buzzwords that I am also afraid that Delphi is becoming this hodge podge (lets see, there is VCL, and then there is CLX, which is pointedly not VCL, and beyond that there are these wizards for generating ActiveX controls, which you should be able to generate from any VCL control but I have never gotten to work just right with any of my VCL controls, and now there is Diesel/DCCIL, which introduces a whole raft of deprecations of your existing code base which was the whole reason for sticking with Delphi in the first place).
LR (labeled release) works by feeding the bugs radioactive food, which causes them to blow radioactive bathtub bubbles, which are in turn detected by a Geiger counter. It is supposed to work at much lower levels of bacteria and much more quickly than streaking culture plates and waiting for colonies to grow. One of the co-experiments on Viking involved some kind of mass-spec approach of burning up the soil to find organics. Levin claims that LR is much more sensitive than that approach, hence the difference in findings.
The conventional wisdom is that Levin's LR found some kind of chemical process - ultra violet-generated soil peroxides, although Levin claims that the supposed processes cannot be duplicated in labs that reproduce Mars conditions.
Levin has been pleading that someone fly Son of LR where there is a pair of LR's, each trying a different "handedness" of the nutrients. All life we know about only eats one particular variety of organic chemicals. It is kind of like feeding one tray Coke and the other Diet Coke, and the tray with Diet Coke should spit and say "blech, who ordered Diet?"
When all is done, I imagine that life will be found on Mars, and when it is, it will by dissappointingly similar to Earth life, scientists will theorize cross-contamination through meteors flying back and forth, and there will be no finding of an independant origin of life for which they will have to trek to Europa.
Are these sightings of the mysterious Aurora (a Brit aircraft-spotter hobbyist saw black triangle was seen in formation with F-111's and a tanker over a North Sea oil rig) which is supposed to be this hypersonic SR-71 replacement, or is this something else?
NAME: Anders Hejlsberg ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Turbo Pascal/Delphi The Empire found a spot for him and now we have to wade through C#. I dare not imagine what Linus Torvalds inflict on us if he went over to the Dark Side.
In this same time scale, we will have space-based telescopes to find earth-sized planets within 100 light years and measure spectra to determine signs of at least primitive life.
I think it is fair to compare dollars because the retail cost of electricity and fuel, taking efficiency into account, is about the same -- my Sun Belt sibs run their houses on about $150/month (lots of AC). Frost Belt me (with a lot of engineering expertise) runs a house on about $80/month -- $60/month for heat and hot water, $20/month for electric. So my sibs Sun Belt houses are at a 2-car equivalent while a reasonably energy-efficient Frost Belt house is perhaps a 1-car equivalent.
How do you balance one of those things on your knees in 0-G?