So intel's CPU architecture is so clunky and complicated compared with the likes of ARM that it needs special intricate OS kernel hacks to get close to the same level of power consumption as the more efficient processors?
Texas sure is big 'n' all. Don't get caught with your pants down in the desert by them thar cotton-picken critters. Rootin', tootin' varmint-shootin, Yosemite Sam on the High Seas.
One of these days, when people finally get to Mars, they're going to wander over to one of those dried-up lake beds, dig with spades and find fossils by the thousand.
You mark my words. I was right about Linux, I was right about NT4, I was right about itanic and I'll be right about this too. Just you wait and see.
I am not much of a physicist, but I did study Astro at university (at the same time as Alcubierre solved the GR equations for the warp drive incidentally, so that's how long ago it was) but...
I suggest you forget about black holes. You're never going to get close enough to one to all intents and purposes to do anything useful with it, both because they're all a long way away, and very dangerous.
As for the Casimir effect, yes, technically you're right, but we're talking quantum scales here and I'm not sure how that applies to GR. As far as I know, they're still working on that. If you could show a gravitational wave produced by a Casimir device, I dare say you'd get a Nobel Prize.
But yes, you really do need the wisdom of someone who's more up-to-date.
Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it.
So, do you know how to make negative mass or negative energy? Is there something you want to tell us? Perhaps you have a magnetic monopole tucked away somewhere for a rainy day as well.
It's an incredibly buoyant place, brimming with start-ups clamouring for young, naieve would-be developers to poach.
There are are some pretty big, established firms there too, like ARM.
Why are the politicians obsessed with having everything in London? It's already over-priced and over-crowded. The rest of the UK needs the investment, not Greater London.
Poor engineers can not afford to live and work there (they've been priced out of the market by the bankers and "executive" tyes), nor should they.
So they can officially unveil it to the public in about 5 years time, after all the "R&D has been done." I see what they're up to. Crafty devils! Just like the Stealth Fighter and the B2.
C and C++ are different languages. Why on earth the C compiler needs to be written in C++ I'll never understand. That means you can't compile the C compiler without a C++ compiler, and C++ is far more complex that C.
C++ compilers are big, complicated and slow, and statistically more likely to contain bugs.
If they were going to move to a "new" better language. they should have gone with something like D.
But really, C ain't broke and it don't need fixing.
C++ needs to be taken out and put out of its misery.
They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
Correct. CDE was/is the "Standard" UNIX/Open Systems desktop environment and vendors were required to have an implementation on their OS in order to compete for various contracts (mainly US government) that mandated it.
As such, it was ugly, barely usable and stagnant. Nobody liked it. It implemented a standardised set of behaviours and looks in order to make all vendors' systems looks and feel the same.
There was no motivation or incentive to improve it. For one vendor to make a change, the would have to get the others to agree to changing the standard, and for all the others to implement the new changes...
Why should the engineers take the blame for everything, even other peoples' failings?
It is everyone's responsibility to speak up when they see something that is wrong or needs fixing, but if stubborn, pig-headed PHBs and MBAs won't see the error of their ways, why should anyone else take the blame?
Everyone working on a project must take responsibility, especially those in positions of privilege and power.
An Agile'ist would say "We didn't need any planning or complex equipment, we just set off walking! And we've established a velocity of 48 kms per day! We're well on the way!"
Wrong.
"Agile" (of which Scrum is one tool) has several ways of planning and they are integral to the system.
Starting with Scrum, you work from a product backlog, which has major product features as agreed between Marketing/Product Development and the Customer. They are in priority and urgency order.
I've found that sprints of 2 weeks to be the optimal length. When I worked with 4 week sprints, things weren't tightly focused enough. The feedback loop was too long.
So at the start of the sprint, you (the engineers) decide what features (from the product backlog) you are going to implement and you break this work down into stories and tasks that will take only a few hours each.
Part of these stories and tasks will be "modelling" i.e. design work (we don't call it documentation - that term is reserved for retrospective design and behaviour analysis).
All of the design and planning has to be planned in to the sprint as proper work. You don't try to slip it in under the radar as most PHBs would like (hey, I'm paying you to write code...) otherwise the system doesn't work.
You can read about Agile design in "Applying UML and Patterns (An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development)" by Craig Larman.
You don't have to agree with or believe everything, but it will give food for thought.
I like Scrum/Agile/Lean because I get things done quicker, more accurately, more reliably and with better records of what I've learned than any other systems I used before (e.g. the crack-the-whip, discipline and long hours school of engineering and the anything-goes-it's-cool-man-testing-is-for-people-who-can't-write-code places).
Test Driven Development is vital for being "Agile." It gives you confidence early that what you've done works, and it gives you the freedom to make large, quick changes to your code and to refactor as needed since you have tests in place to ensure that you haven't broken anything. It takes years of practice, but I find it very powerful. I often crank out 1000 lines of working C code in a day now. I used to struggle to do 50.
Scrum is a feedback cycle that is intended to keep you pointing in the right direction. If you do it right, it works.
If your managers are lazy, ignorant, unsupportive etc. it won't work, because they are part of the feedback loop and they have important responsibilities to enure that the right kind of information comes in, and that customers are kept informed of progress.
If your managers are the old-fashioned, dictatorial, don't-trust-the-non-management-level-staff kind, you will struggle. When I started doing Scrum, I worked for one of those. It worked much better after she retired.
As for your last point, I have no idea how you'd do a controlled experiment. I suppose the best you could do is a statistical study of tens of thousands of projects.
Agile does work, and it works well provided that you have cooperative managers and good developers (or at least good lead developers).
Agile fails when management dictates what the developers do, management doesn't trust the developers, the developers are clueless or the developers are lazy.
Clueless, ignorant, lazy people cause projects to fail no matter what methodology they follow.
You don't need to spend money to "do Agile." If you want the official training, you can pay for it. There has recently been a break-away movement by the originators of Agile/Scrum to go back to basics and to provide much lower cost certification.
I was trained in Scum/Agile/Design for Lean Six Sigma to the green belt level and have over 4 years experience. I went to a new job and initiated Scum in my new team. I gave a presentation to all of the engineering staff, got their buy-in and my software team started working in sprints. I was the scrum master for the first few cycles and now we're taking it in turns to get experience.
I've tried to start with the basics and to avoid it turning into a "cargo cult." It's working very well. The PHBs love it because they know what's going on at all times without many frequent boring meetings and they get a demo once a fortnight of the new "value" that we've created in line with our sprint goals.
The developers like it because the work is in bite-size chunks, management can see progress (and so we get credit and praise), interruptions and emergent work are monitored (the effect on progress can be seen) and we are delivering working incremental pieces of the product and integrating and testing them early.
Progress and quality have never been so good at this place, and the developers are enjoying being seen to be delivering and having things that work.
The engineering director is so impressed that he wants the other teams to adopt Agile/Scrum too. I'm getting moved to another team temporarily to get them started on scum.
I also use Test Driven Development to write my code and have implemented a test stub mechanism of my own. My colleagues have seen how successful it is and are starting to learn how to do it as well.
I agree, and that's Mrs. Turgid's position too. She teaches English at secondary level and, although she says that Harry Potter isn't very well written, as you said it's the best thing to have happened to children's reading for years.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, our teachers belittled us in public if they thought what we were reading wasn't good enough, and my father discouraged me from reading anything that wasn't "hard" science fiction. I soon got bored and gave up reading fiction.
Reading fiction is good for the imagination, and it's good for the character in other ways (something I didn't realise until my late teens). Through fiction we explore human interaction, amongst other things. Shakespeare is particularly good for this and it's why it's taught in schools. Too bad they waited until after we'd been bored to death to explain that. We might have paid more attention.
Note I don't like Shakespeare in general. It has too many words, too quickly for me. The comedies are good, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there any atheists in Pakistan? Or does that get you hanged?
So intel's CPU architecture is so clunky and complicated compared with the likes of ARM that it needs special intricate OS kernel hacks to get close to the same level of power consumption as the more efficient processors?
Well, howdy pardner!
Texas sure is big 'n' all. Don't get caught with your pants down in the desert by them thar cotton-picken critters. Rootin', tootin' varmint-shootin, Yosemite Sam on the High Seas.
One of these days, when people finally get to Mars, they're going to wander over to one of those dried-up lake beds, dig with spades and find fossils by the thousand.
You mark my words. I was right about Linux, I was right about NT4, I was right about itanic and I'll be right about this too. Just you wait and see.
I am not much of a physicist, but I did study Astro at university (at the same time as Alcubierre solved the GR equations for the warp drive incidentally, so that's how long ago it was) but...
I suggest you forget about black holes. You're never going to get close enough to one to all intents and purposes to do anything useful with it, both because they're all a long way away, and very dangerous.
As for the Casimir effect, yes, technically you're right, but we're talking quantum scales here and I'm not sure how that applies to GR. As far as I know, they're still working on that. If you could show a gravitational wave produced by a Casimir device, I dare say you'd get a Nobel Prize.
But yes, you really do need the wisdom of someone who's more up-to-date.
Now cue the naysayers to tell me how crazy I am for even thinking it.
So, do you know how to make negative mass or negative energy? Is there something you want to tell us? Perhaps you have a magnetic monopole tucked away somewhere for a rainy day as well.
More specifically, "Do you know your place?"
It's an incredibly buoyant place, brimming with start-ups clamouring for young, naieve would-be developers to poach.
There are are some pretty big, established firms there too, like ARM.
Why are the politicians obsessed with having everything in London? It's already over-priced and over-crowded. The rest of the UK needs the investment, not Greater London.
Poor engineers can not afford to live and work there (they've been priced out of the market by the bankers and "executive" tyes), nor should they.
"Ah, but "
The opening words to all religious arguments.
So they can officially unveil it to the public in about 5 years time, after all the "R&D has been done." I see what they're up to. Crafty devils! Just like the Stealth Fighter and the B2.
Argh! Whatever next...
C and C++ are different languages. Why on earth the C compiler needs to be written in C++ I'll never understand. That means you can't compile the C compiler without a C++ compiler, and C++ is far more complex that C.
C++ compilers are big, complicated and slow, and statistically more likely to contain bugs.
If they were going to move to a "new" better language. they should have gone with something like D.
But really, C ain't broke and it don't need fixing.
C++ needs to be taken out and put out of its misery.
KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep and XFce, to name but a few, were on the Solaris Freeware Companion CD.
They have no real interest in getting out of the 80s/90s.
Correct. CDE was/is the "Standard" UNIX/Open Systems desktop environment and vendors were required to have an implementation on their OS in order to compete for various contracts (mainly US government) that mandated it.
As such, it was ugly, barely usable and stagnant. Nobody liked it. It implemented a standardised set of behaviours and looks in order to make all vendors' systems looks and feel the same.
There was no motivation or incentive to improve it. For one vendor to make a change, the would have to get the others to agree to changing the standard, and for all the others to implement the new changes...
Muse is a big step up from Glee, but then so is a white-noise generator.
Indeed. I prefer to listen to the original Ah-Ha, Blondie and Queen.
Muse's version of The Sun Always Shines on TV isn't even a pale imitation of the original.
We engineers should refuse to put up with this. I know it's not always possible to find a new job, but we must vote with our feet wherever possible.
In my experience, businesses run by people like that are usually on their way down anyway.
Why should the engineers take the blame for everything, even other peoples' failings?
It is everyone's responsibility to speak up when they see something that is wrong or needs fixing, but if stubborn, pig-headed PHBs and MBAs won't see the error of their ways, why should anyone else take the blame?
Everyone working on a project must take responsibility, especially those in positions of privilege and power.
Sounds like some PHB didn't like the sound of Agile and decided to prove that it "doesn't work" by setting up a project to fail.
An Agile'ist would say "We didn't need any planning or complex equipment, we just set off walking! And we've established a velocity of 48 kms per day! We're well on the way!"
Wrong.
"Agile" (of which Scrum is one tool) has several ways of planning and they are integral to the system.
Starting with Scrum, you work from a product backlog, which has major product features as agreed between Marketing/Product Development and the Customer. They are in priority and urgency order.
I've found that sprints of 2 weeks to be the optimal length. When I worked with 4 week sprints, things weren't tightly focused enough. The feedback loop was too long.
So at the start of the sprint, you (the engineers) decide what features (from the product backlog) you are going to implement and you break this work down into stories and tasks that will take only a few hours each.
Part of these stories and tasks will be "modelling" i.e. design work (we don't call it documentation - that term is reserved for retrospective design and behaviour analysis).
All of the design and planning has to be planned in to the sprint as proper work. You don't try to slip it in under the radar as most PHBs would like (hey, I'm paying you to write code...) otherwise the system doesn't work.
You can read about Agile design in "Applying UML and Patterns (An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development)" by Craig Larman.
You don't have to agree with or believe everything, but it will give food for thought.
I like Scrum/Agile/Lean because I get things done quicker, more accurately, more reliably and with better records of what I've learned than any other systems I used before (e.g. the crack-the-whip, discipline and long hours school of engineering and the anything-goes-it's-cool-man-testing-is-for-people-who-can't-write-code places).
Test Driven Development is vital for being "Agile." It gives you confidence early that what you've done works, and it gives you the freedom to make large, quick changes to your code and to refactor as needed since you have tests in place to ensure that you haven't broken anything. It takes years of practice, but I find it very powerful. I often crank out 1000 lines of working C code in a day now. I used to struggle to do 50.
Scrum is a feedback cycle that is intended to keep you pointing in the right direction. If you do it right, it works.
If your managers are lazy, ignorant, unsupportive etc. it won't work, because they are part of the feedback loop and they have important responsibilities to enure that the right kind of information comes in, and that customers are kept informed of progress.
If your managers are the old-fashioned, dictatorial, don't-trust-the-non-management-level-staff kind, you will struggle. When I started doing Scrum, I worked for one of those. It worked much better after she retired.
As for your last point, I have no idea how you'd do a controlled experiment. I suppose the best you could do is a statistical study of tens of thousands of projects.
No, it's something to do with a worn-out keyboard.
Agile does work, and it works well provided that you have cooperative managers and good developers (or at least good lead developers).
Agile fails when management dictates what the developers do, management doesn't trust the developers, the developers are clueless or the developers are lazy.
Clueless, ignorant, lazy people cause projects to fail no matter what methodology they follow.
You don't need to spend money to "do Agile." If you want the official training, you can pay for it. There has recently been a break-away movement by the originators of Agile/Scrum to go back to basics and to provide much lower cost certification.
I was trained in Scum/Agile/Design for Lean Six Sigma to the green belt level and have over 4 years experience. I went to a new job and initiated Scum in my new team. I gave a presentation to all of the engineering staff, got their buy-in and my software team started working in sprints. I was the scrum master for the first few cycles and now we're taking it in turns to get experience.
I've tried to start with the basics and to avoid it turning into a "cargo cult." It's working very well. The PHBs love it because they know what's going on at all times without many frequent boring meetings and they get a demo once a fortnight of the new "value" that we've created in line with our sprint goals.
The developers like it because the work is in bite-size chunks, management can see progress (and so we get credit and praise), interruptions and emergent work are monitored (the effect on progress can be seen) and we are delivering working incremental pieces of the product and integrating and testing them early.
Progress and quality have never been so good at this place, and the developers are enjoying being seen to be delivering and having things that work.
The engineering director is so impressed that he wants the other teams to adopt Agile/Scrum too. I'm getting moved to another team temporarily to get them started on scum.
I also use Test Driven Development to write my code and have implemented a test stub mechanism of my own. My colleagues have seen how successful it is and are starting to learn how to do it as well.
Space tourism makes very little sense.
Tourism makes very little sense. After all, the tourist rarely profits financially from their tour.
The beaches of Spain, France, Italy and Greece fill every summer with people not profiting financially from being there.
Damn you, Kropotkin!
How fast does it have to go to break wind?
It was 106 at my car on friday
That's 314 in New Money.
I agree, and that's Mrs. Turgid's position too. She teaches English at secondary level and, although she says that Harry Potter isn't very well written, as you said it's the best thing to have happened to children's reading for years.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, our teachers belittled us in public if they thought what we were reading wasn't good enough, and my father discouraged me from reading anything that wasn't "hard" science fiction. I soon got bored and gave up reading fiction.
Reading fiction is good for the imagination, and it's good for the character in other ways (something I didn't realise until my late teens). Through fiction we explore human interaction, amongst other things. Shakespeare is particularly good for this and it's why it's taught in schools. Too bad they waited until after we'd been bored to death to explain that. We might have paid more attention.
Note I don't like Shakespeare in general. It has too many words, too quickly for me. The comedies are good, though.