Give Mozilla a unique selling proposition - something that you can tell a prospective user about why they must switch from IE to Mozilla, i.e., "You should switch to Mozilla because it does X", where X is something obviously good, and not easily done with IE. For 95% of prospective users, X != - cross-platform - thwarts the evil M$ - is a really cool open-source project - and so forth
Lose the dragon. It's difficult enough to introduce something new into a corporate environment, and mythical firebreathing critters are of no help. Doesn't have to be boring - just not too strange.
Hmmm.... puzzling evidence. As I recall, you're right. However, I also recall that in tests where frequencies were pulled apart, phase shifted hither and yon, and reassembled, no difference could be heard.
There are two types of audio components: those that introduce significant noise, and those that don't.
Any component that introduces less than 0.1% THD falls in the "no significant noise" category, and is interchangeable with any other like component. Nobody can tell the difference between any two amplifiers, CD players, speaker cables, or other things that introduce less than 0.1% THD, unless the component is malfunctioning and making funny noises (clicks, hums, or whatnot). "Audiophile" cables are not an investment; rather, they are an extra tax levied on dimwits.
Frequency response doesn't matter, as long as you can get a flat 20Hz-20kHz. Yes, a 20kHz cutoff means that you'll have phase distortion. So what. It's been well-proven that ears are phase-insensitive.
Then comes the class of components that introduce audible noise. These are all electromechanical: speakers, microphones, phono cartridges, analog tape, and so forth. These all noticeably distort. It's merely a matter of choosing the distortion that most pleases (or least offends) you. In general, flatter response and lower THD is preferable. The degree of distortion is somewhat correlated at low price points, but totally uncorrelated with high price.
I once paid a visit to the office of a friend of mine who worked for one of the best-know makers of ridiculously-expensive audio gear. At the time, I was designing analog integrated circuits, so I knew a little about how to design circuits. I spent a little time chatting with one of their "crack designers" - he was absolutely ignorant, couldn't design a simple amplifier to save his life.
I agree with everything you say about C++. On the the Pascal side, however, I believe that fixing the language was necessary but not sufficient; witness Borland's Delphi, which features Object Pascal, a superb dialect of Pascal. For something like six years Delphi/Object Pascal was unmatched by anything in the Windows arena - nothing was even close - but it did not take over the world. Now that Delphi is essentially matched by C#/VB.NET, I suspect that Delphi's days are, sadly, numbered.
I guess the point is that most users are unable to determine what's good and what's not.
This may be more expensive, but CANRF modules might be good for this.
Since the bandwidth needs are almost nil, it seems like there ought to be some really sleazy, simple, and effective way to do this with RF. Perhaps have a central device that polls each voter sequentially for their answer(s) several times a second. This would get rid of the need to sense collisions or other stuff that happens when multiple conversations take place simultaneously.
Good luck!
Actually, I've been reading Don's stuff since the 1970s - I learned digital electronics from his TTL and CMOS cookbooks. He's brilliant, an excellent writer, and one of the people I admire most.
That being said, he's also wrong sometimes, as are we all. For example, I believe that it was in his "Micro Cookbook" that he said that microcomputers would go nowhere in the business world.
A lot of what Don says about patents is true, and I do agree that everyone thinking about filing a patent should read his "Case Against Patents" (and read "Patent it Yourself", Nolo Press). But, in the end, we gotta decide for ourselves. Personally, I think that patents are appropriate in some circumstances.
I'll start with the obligatory acknowledgement that a ton of bogus patents are issued.
But some patents are legitimate.
If a technique is publicly disclosed prior to filing a patent, then a one-year timeclock starts in which you must file for a US patent on the technique or lose the right to file. In addition, the ability to file is lost immediately in Europe.
So, NDAs are very useful if one intends to file patents.
I've been coding for a million years: 6502 machine code all the way up to a recent foray into C#, and almost everything in between. Here's my take, for what it's worth. And, it's your chance to mod me down for pontificating!
Delphi is the best all-around language ever for producing Windows apps. The Delphi programmer has control over everything if they want it, but they don't need to muck around with nasty details unless they need to. It encourages clean coding. Performance is superb. And the IDE is excellent. The Delphi package (language plus IDE) has been the path of least resistance to getting an app done for the past six or seven years.
Prior to Delphi, the way to go was VB with C DLLs. Do the UI in VB, do the internals as C DLLs. VB was great for abstracting nasty stuff, but it often overabstracted, and performance was ungood. Writing companion DLLs in C boosted flexibility and performance.
Generally speaking, C is basically not much beyond portable assembly language. If a reasonable alternative is available, and it usually is, using C for anything beyond embedded systems or super resource-critical applications is probably not a good idea, as the code tends to be dangerous and obsfuscated. And keeping track of pointers is just nutty.
C++ is a nightmare. In theory it's object oriented, but all of the code that I've seen is a total mess, more like C using the C++ libraries. Ugh.
Java is almost good: it is pretty safe, and encourages good habits. But I find it clumsy - like it was designed by academics rather than practical developers. Lack of enumerated types, for example, is insane, and encourages unsafe programming. It's also a pig, which doesn't matter so much for a lot of things these days - we usually have lots of CPU cycles to spare. For doing GUI apps, Swing is a weird joke - a pig's pig - which should be forgotten immediately. And the Java IDEs have only recently become usable for command-line stuff, but they suck as bad as Swing for GUI development.
Now C#. Having toyed with C# for an app recently, I'm quite impressed. It's sort of like the best of Java with some of Delphi's goodness added. It's ALMOST as good as Delphi - which makes sense, since the same fellow (Anders Hejlsbeg) was key in developing both of these languages. And.NET, to which C# is bolted, is pretty good as well. And the IDE is very nice. So, all-in-all, I think that C# is a good choice for Windows development. The web forms stuff seems interesting, but I have a feeling that using it would be something that I'd end up regretting - there's bound to be nasty gotchas that won't show up until late in the project.
I've been awarded a few patents; based on my experiences, here's my take:
Seems to me that the biggest problems are: 1. Examiners generally look only at prior art that has moved through the patent office, and do not have general knowledge of a field. So if prior art exists that is unpatented, even in very common use, the examiner may not know it.
2. Once a patent is granted, even one for which there is ample identical prior art that the examiner missed, "infringing" on the patent and having the courts decide is a horror show.
My suggestion is that a patent first be granted and published with some period for the public to comment to the examiner, say, 90 days. This would give people knowledgable in the field of the patent time to point out prior art that the examiner missed. After the comment period, the examiner has another 90 days or so to finalize (or reject) the patent, giving it all the same protection that patents currently have.
This system would probably prevent a ton of bad patents.
While most medecine is only pretend science, there is some actual science going on beneath the surface.
At www.pubmed.gov, you'll find abstracts of virtually every medical journal article published over the last 30 or so years. It includes the Medline database and some other stuff.
If you're wondering about a specific topic, fire it up, and in minutes you'll know more than most physicians ever will about real science in medicine.
I've got a buddy that tests jet engine failure
modes. His group does things to engines that are mounted on BIG concrete blocks and set running at full throttle.
What kind of things do they do to engines? Well...
firing assorted frozen birds from a cannon at 600 MPH into the engine to see what happens.
Setting off explosive charges in the engine to make sure that the resulting blizzard of metal ejects out the back of the engine, rather than the sides, where it could wreck mayhem.
The results are filmed for analysis - unfortunately, the films are are confidential.
From www.m-w.com: disease: a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning
A disease can be communicable, but it doesn't have to be. Actually, to truly capture the meaning, examine the word: dis-ease. Not at ease.
Just because a person has traits that are similar to those found in a certain well-documented disease or syndrome does not mean that this person has some low-grade form of the disease. For example, nerds (and musicians) and their children do seem to often have certain traits that are shared by people with autism and/or Aspergers - talking late, and some of the traits that you mention. However, my best guess, buttressed by a little science (way more science than is normally found in the field of psychology), is that this is an issue that is distinct from autism and Asperger's - in fact, it tends to be common in extremely bright people, including top physicists (Einstein, Feynman, and others), mathematicians, engineers, musicians, and others (Thomas Edison...).
If one has a son (or daughter) that is "different" , and suspected of autism, I'd do two things:
1. Administer the m-chat test. It's the *only* test ever shown to be predictive of outcome in toddlers, vis-a-vis autism and similar. All other tests and diagnosis are speculative.
2. Purchase "Late-Talking Children", and "The Einstein Syndrome", both by Thomas Sowell. Excellent books.
There are several problems with the concept of an "autism spectrum":
1. I've not found one bit of scientific evidence that it exists. There are certainly tests that could be done to tend to prove or disprove its existance. For some odd reason, these have not been done, to my knowledge. It is conjecture, and it's very dangerous (though sadly common) to base medicine on conjecture - it tends to cause injury and death. When it comes to medicine, the vast majority of "reasonable hypotheses" are found to be incorrect when exposed to the light of science. Look at hormone replacement therapy as one of the many recent examples - it made sense in theory, but in retrospect, after outcomes were actually tested, it turns out to have mainly injured, killed, and cost a fortune.
2. the "spectrum" tends to confer some degree of illness on whoever the "diagnosis" is applied to. This is why we now have a bunch of otherwise-perfectly-fine nerds running around worrying about their new "illness". Just because someone is less sociable than, say, a used-car salesperson, they do not necessarily possess some degree of disease. Nerds may not be social butterflies, but they are typically honest and good people - this is not an illness of any sort in my book. Most are just a little shy, something that can easily be cured by approaching it as shyness, rather than as some facet of autism.
3. There are, to my knowledge, no treatments that have been shown to change outcome. (Again, we see the psychology community's staunch aversion to testing hypotheses by testing outcomes.) However, there are definitely speculative treatments that are pushed by people with very, very important titles - treatments that have neither been shown to be safe or effective.
This is not to say that if a person has a specific problem, they should not seek treatment via a proven intervention. However, speculating that a syndrome exists, and treating it with speculative interventions - this is very bad and dangerous.
I've done a lot of research on the whole spectrum autism area recently. (By way of background, I've worked in the medical field for some years - I've authored papers, run clinical trials, and so forth).
Here's a short synopsis of what I've found, through reading journal articles and books, and interviewing psychologists:
Autism is a real disease, terrible and sad. However, it is wildly overdiagnosed in youngsters.
Aspergers syndrome is probably also a real disease, related in some ways to autism. It is also wildly overdiagnosed in youngsters. It also seems to get pinned on nerds. But people with real Asperger's aren't simply nerds - they have profound and obvious problems.
There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that there is an autism spectrum (beyond the narrow spectrum of those that truly have a serious, serious disease). The best evidence indicates that the "autism spectrum" is simply a speculation by a few psychologists that people who are shy and introspective are somehow related to people who have a profound problem.
PDD-NOS is an interesting diagnosis developed by the folks that are pushing the idea of a wide spectrum of autism. The diagnosis is very arbitrary - yes there are criteria, but these are very subjective. Applied to young children, it has little if any no prognostic value.
Finally, there does not seem to exist even one controlled scientific study that demonstrates that the outcomes of any of these conditions can be changed - even if they do exist. All treatments are purely speculative.
Commentary time - I know I'll get modded down, but this might actually be useful for someone:
What's interesting is that for all of the loud chatter from the spectrum autism crowd, they totally avoid doing scientific studies. They do studies, but never controlled ones, which are the basis of science and medicine.
As far as I can tell, autism and its "spectrum" have become the "next big thing" in psychology, following in the footsteps of lobotomies, electroconvulsive therapy, repressed memories, and ADHD. Like its predecessors, the "autism spectrum" has no basis in science, and will likely, over time, go the way of other medical diagnoses and procedures that are based on speculation rather than science.
More nonsense from Bezos that will never work, and waste a ton of dough. Is it any wonder that those really useful and popular Segway thingies are sold on Amazon?
These are nice and useful things, yes, but not particularly relevant to the average person. They do not have strong effects on average human lifespan or quality of life.
As far as I can see, we've spent zillions and zillions on DNA research, without a really big bang for the buck.
I was thinking about this very subject the other day.
It seems strange to me that while, in principle, the discovery of the structure of DNA was a wonderful thing, it doesn't seem to have affected the average person's life very much. Far less, it seems, then Dr. Fleming's noticing that bread mold contamination was killing his bacterial cultures.
Perhaps I'm missing something, and understanding the structure of DNA is contributing more than I think. But, it occurs to me that if we could put a man on the moon in about 10 years, we ought to be able to do something more with DNA in 50 years.
I suspect that science has become too bureaucratized and institutionalized to know which end is up anymore.
I'm told that somewhere between 95% and 93% of the fiber-optic 'net backbone is unused; sounds like AOL is trying to light most of it up!
However, there is the obvious (at least to me) problem of bandwidth to the home. The vast bulk of homes that do have broadband are sharing reasonably limited bandwidth with other homes. Streaming high-quality video to many people at once who are sharing moderate bandwith seems like a no-go. In otherwords, it seems to me that if the service catches on, they're dead; they'll have to strive for mediocrity.
Unless we put fiber into everyone's home. Yeah!
I'll keep my Tivo for now. One of the best things I ever purchased.
I know that I'll get yelled at by this crowd, but, without knowing more specifics on your application, I'd recommend PostgreSQL DB, a Visual Basic front end for forms, and perhaps Crystal Reports for reporting.
This will give you a nice blend of tremendous power and ease of use.
I've been lusting after these for years. Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) are basically big foam lego blocks with channels running through them. Build the walls out of the lego blocks, stick rebar through the channels, pour in some concrete, and HEY PRESTO, a super-strong, well-insulated, and quiet wall. To make it "nice", veneers are put on the outside and inside of the wall.
(It's a little more complex than the above description - but not too bad)
A friend of mine who designs buildings says that these are popular in Canada and Europe. The only downside is that they're so freakin' tough that you can't really rip hunks out if you decide to make additions later.
..then it's almost certainly bogus, unless proven otherwise. Most of them wouldn't know the scientific method if it smacked them in the head.
Yes, the folks that gave us lobotomies, eletro-shock therapy, repressed memories (Are you *sure* your daycare teacher didn't do magic sex stuff to you? Really sure? Really really sure?), rampant ADHD and autism (over)diagnoses, along with less overtly harmful stuff like psychotherapy. All of these are based on pretend science -- no need for yucky stuff like experiments and control groups.
I was (too-subtly) alluding to my belief that the use of FORTRAN (a generally ridiculous tool to use these days) represents a symptom of an underlying disease: the intellectual vacuum that has proliferated in science. Years ago we had some smart folks. Now we have institutionalization, greed, lack of accountability, and general BS.
Try a little experiment: read a scientific paper from 30 or 40 years ago. It will likely be concise, readable, and thoughtful, with a real statement at the end that tells the reader the findings and the significance. Now read a scientific paper from the last 10 years. It will typically be incomprehensible, filled with faulty statistics, and will invariably end with some vague and meaningless statement of the findings, or lack thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
Give Mozilla a unique selling proposition - something that you can tell a prospective user about why they must switch from IE to Mozilla, i.e., "You should switch to Mozilla because it does X", where X is something obviously good, and not easily done with IE. For 95% of prospective users, X !=
- cross-platform
- thwarts the evil M$
- is a really cool open-source project
- and so forth
Lose the dragon. It's difficult enough to introduce something new into a corporate environment, and mythical firebreathing critters are of no help. Doesn't have to be boring - just not too strange.
Hmmm.... puzzling evidence. As I recall, you're right. However, I also recall that in tests where frequencies were pulled apart, phase shifted hither and yon, and reassembled, no difference could be heard.
How to put this all together?
There are two types of audio components: those that introduce significant noise, and those that don't.
Any component that introduces less than 0.1% THD falls in the "no significant noise" category, and is interchangeable with any other like component. Nobody can tell the difference between any two amplifiers, CD players, speaker cables, or other things that introduce less than 0.1% THD, unless the component is malfunctioning and making funny noises (clicks, hums, or whatnot). "Audiophile" cables are not an investment; rather, they are an extra tax levied on dimwits.
Frequency response doesn't matter, as long as you can get a flat 20Hz-20kHz. Yes, a 20kHz cutoff means that you'll have phase distortion. So what. It's been well-proven that ears are phase-insensitive.
Then comes the class of components that introduce audible noise. These are all electromechanical: speakers, microphones, phono cartridges, analog tape, and so forth. These all noticeably distort. It's merely a matter of choosing the distortion that most pleases (or least offends) you. In general, flatter response and lower THD is preferable. The degree of distortion is somewhat correlated at low price points, but totally uncorrelated with high price.
I once paid a visit to the office of a friend of mine who worked for one of the best-know makers of ridiculously-expensive audio gear. At the time, I was designing analog integrated circuits, so I knew a little about how to design circuits. I spent a little time chatting with one of their "crack designers" - he was absolutely ignorant, couldn't design a simple amplifier to save his life.
I agree with everything you say about C++. On the the Pascal side, however, I believe that fixing the language was necessary but not sufficient; witness Borland's Delphi, which features Object Pascal, a superb dialect of Pascal. For something like six years Delphi/Object Pascal was unmatched by anything in the Windows arena - nothing was even close - but it did not take over the world. Now that Delphi is essentially matched by C#/VB.NET, I suspect that Delphi's days are, sadly, numbered.
I guess the point is that most users are unable to determine what's good and what's not.
Since the bandwidth needs are almost nil, it seems like there ought to be some really sleazy, simple, and effective way to do this with RF. Perhaps have a central device that polls each voter sequentially for their answer(s) several times a second. This would get rid of the need to sense collisions or other stuff that happens when multiple conversations take place simultaneously. Good luck!
Actually, I've been reading Don's stuff since the 1970s - I learned digital electronics from his TTL and CMOS cookbooks. He's brilliant, an excellent writer, and one of the people I admire most.
That being said, he's also wrong sometimes, as are we all. For example, I believe that it was in his "Micro Cookbook" that he said that microcomputers would go nowhere in the business world.
A lot of what Don says about patents is true, and I do agree that everyone thinking about filing a patent should read his "Case Against Patents" (and read "Patent it Yourself", Nolo Press). But, in the end, we gotta decide for ourselves. Personally, I think that patents are appropriate in some circumstances.
I'll start with the obligatory acknowledgement that a ton of bogus patents are issued.
But some patents are legitimate.
If a technique is publicly disclosed prior to filing a patent, then a one-year timeclock starts in which you must file for a US patent on the technique or lose the right to file. In addition, the ability to file is lost immediately in Europe.
So, NDAs are very useful if one intends to file patents.
I've been coding for a million years: 6502 machine code all the way up to a recent foray into C#, and almost everything in between. Here's my take, for what it's worth. And, it's your chance to mod me down for pontificating!
.NET, to which C# is bolted, is pretty good as well. And the IDE is very nice. So, all-in-all, I think that C# is a good choice for Windows development. The web forms stuff seems interesting, but I have a feeling that using it would be something that I'd end up regretting - there's bound to be nasty gotchas that won't show up until late in the project.
Delphi is the best all-around language ever for producing Windows apps. The Delphi programmer has control over everything if they want it, but they don't need to muck around with nasty details unless they need to. It encourages clean coding. Performance is superb. And the IDE is excellent. The Delphi package (language plus IDE) has been the path of least resistance to getting an app done for the past six or seven years.
Prior to Delphi, the way to go was VB with C DLLs. Do the UI in VB, do the internals as C DLLs. VB was great for abstracting nasty stuff, but it often overabstracted, and performance was ungood. Writing companion DLLs in C boosted flexibility and performance.
Generally speaking, C is basically not much beyond portable assembly language. If a reasonable alternative is available, and it usually is, using C for anything beyond embedded systems or super resource-critical applications is probably not a good idea, as the code tends to be dangerous and obsfuscated. And keeping track of pointers is just nutty.
C++ is a nightmare. In theory it's object oriented, but all of the code that I've seen is a total mess, more like C using the C++ libraries. Ugh.
Java is almost good: it is pretty safe, and encourages good habits. But I find it clumsy - like it was designed by academics rather than practical developers. Lack of enumerated types, for example, is insane, and encourages unsafe programming. It's also a pig, which doesn't matter so much for a lot of things these days - we usually have lots of CPU cycles to spare. For doing GUI apps, Swing is a weird joke - a pig's pig - which should be forgotten immediately. And the Java IDEs have only recently become usable for command-line stuff, but they suck as bad as Swing for GUI development.
Now C#. Having toyed with C# for an app recently, I'm quite impressed. It's sort of like the best of Java with some of Delphi's goodness added. It's ALMOST as good as Delphi - which makes sense, since the same fellow (Anders Hejlsbeg) was key in developing both of these languages. And
I've been awarded a few patents; based on my experiences, here's my take:
Seems to me that the biggest problems are:
1. Examiners generally look only at prior art that has moved through the patent office, and do not have general knowledge of a field. So if prior art exists that is unpatented, even in very common use, the examiner may not know it.
2. Once a patent is granted, even one for which there is ample identical prior art that the examiner missed, "infringing" on the patent and having the courts decide is a horror show.
My suggestion is that a patent first be granted and published with some period for the public to comment to the examiner, say, 90 days. This would give people knowledgable in the field of the patent time to point out prior art that the examiner missed. After the comment period, the examiner has another 90 days or so to finalize (or reject) the patent, giving it all the same protection that patents currently have.
This system would probably prevent a ton of bad patents.
At www.pubmed.gov, you'll find abstracts of virtually every medical journal article published over the last 30 or so years. It includes the Medline database and some other stuff.
If you're wondering about a specific topic, fire it up, and in minutes you'll know more than most physicians ever will about real science in medicine.
What kind of things do they do to engines? Well...
- firing assorted frozen birds from a cannon at 600 MPH into the engine to see what happens.
- Setting off explosive charges in the engine to make sure that the resulting blizzard of metal ejects out the back of the engine, rather than the sides, where it could wreck mayhem.
The results are filmed for analysis - unfortunately, the films are are confidential.I've had great luck with Televantage. Stable, good features, users find it easy-to-use.
VOIP scares me. Seems pretty complex and expensive.
Good luck!
From www.m-w.com: disease: a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning
A disease can be communicable, but it doesn't have to be. Actually, to truly capture the meaning, examine the word: dis-ease. Not at ease.
Just because a person has traits that are similar to those found in a certain well-documented disease or syndrome does not mean that this person has some low-grade form of the disease. For example, nerds (and musicians) and their children do seem to often have certain traits that are shared by people with autism and/or Aspergers - talking late, and some of the traits that you mention. However, my best guess, buttressed by a little science (way more science than is normally found in the field of psychology), is that this is an issue that is distinct from autism and Asperger's - in fact, it tends to be common in extremely bright people, including top physicists (Einstein, Feynman, and others), mathematicians, engineers, musicians, and others (Thomas Edison...).
If one has a son (or daughter) that is "different" , and suspected of autism, I'd do two things:
1. Administer the m-chat test. It's the *only* test ever shown to be predictive of outcome in toddlers, vis-a-vis autism and similar. All other tests and diagnosis are speculative.
2. Purchase "Late-Talking Children", and "The Einstein Syndrome", both by Thomas Sowell. Excellent books.
My heart goes out to you. Good luck!
There are several problems with the concept of an "autism spectrum":
1. I've not found one bit of scientific evidence that it exists. There are certainly tests that could be done to tend to prove or disprove its existance. For some odd reason, these have not been done, to my knowledge. It is conjecture, and it's very dangerous (though sadly common) to base medicine on conjecture - it tends to cause injury and death. When it comes to medicine, the vast majority of "reasonable hypotheses" are found to be incorrect when exposed to the light of science. Look at hormone replacement therapy as one of the many recent examples - it made sense in theory, but in retrospect, after outcomes were actually tested, it turns out to have mainly injured, killed, and cost a fortune.
2. the "spectrum" tends to confer some degree of illness on whoever the "diagnosis" is applied to. This is why we now have a bunch of otherwise-perfectly-fine nerds running around worrying about their new "illness". Just because someone is less sociable than, say, a used-car salesperson, they do not necessarily possess some degree of disease. Nerds may not be social butterflies, but they are typically honest and good people - this is not an illness of any sort in my book. Most are just a little shy, something that can easily be cured by approaching it as shyness, rather than as some facet of autism.
3. There are, to my knowledge, no treatments that have been shown to change outcome. (Again, we see the psychology community's staunch aversion to testing hypotheses by testing outcomes.) However, there are definitely speculative treatments that are pushed by people with very, very important titles - treatments that have neither been shown to be safe or effective.
This is not to say that if a person has a specific problem, they should not seek treatment via a proven intervention. However, speculating that a syndrome exists, and treating it with speculative interventions - this is very bad and dangerous.
I've done a lot of research on the whole spectrum autism area recently. (By way of background, I've worked in the medical field for some years - I've authored papers, run clinical trials, and so forth).
Here's a short synopsis of what I've found, through reading journal articles and books, and interviewing psychologists:
Autism is a real disease, terrible and sad. However, it is wildly overdiagnosed in youngsters.
Aspergers syndrome is probably also a real disease, related in some ways to autism. It is also wildly overdiagnosed in youngsters. It also seems to get pinned on nerds. But people with real Asperger's aren't simply nerds - they have profound and obvious problems.
There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that there is an autism spectrum (beyond the narrow spectrum of those that truly have a serious, serious disease). The best evidence indicates that the "autism spectrum" is simply a speculation by a few psychologists that people who are shy and introspective are somehow related to people who have a profound problem.
PDD-NOS is an interesting diagnosis developed by the folks that are pushing the idea of a wide spectrum of autism. The diagnosis is very arbitrary - yes there are criteria, but these are very subjective. Applied to young children, it has little if any no prognostic value.
Finally, there does not seem to exist even one controlled scientific study that demonstrates that the outcomes of any of these conditions can be changed - even if they do exist. All treatments are purely speculative.
Commentary time - I know I'll get modded down, but this might actually be useful for someone:
What's interesting is that for all of the loud chatter from the spectrum autism crowd, they totally avoid doing scientific studies. They do studies, but never controlled ones, which are the basis of science and medicine.
As far as I can tell, autism and its "spectrum" have become the "next big thing" in psychology, following in the footsteps of lobotomies, electroconvulsive therapy, repressed memories, and ADHD. Like its predecessors, the "autism spectrum" has no basis in science, and will likely, over time, go the way of other medical diagnoses and procedures that are based on speculation rather than science.
Yeah, cute, but I cannot imagine how this would do anything but wreck havoc in a high wind. If a hurricane or tornado comes along...
I think that something much higher would be needed to use balloons, so as to avoid most weather effects.
More nonsense from Bezos that will never work, and waste a ton of dough. Is it any wonder that those really useful and popular Segway thingies are sold on Amazon?
Excellent VCS, which also tracks change requests and bugs, making for a great tool for the development process.
It's neither Free nor free (actually fairly expensive), but it is great.
These are nice and useful things, yes, but not particularly relevant to the average person. They do not have strong effects on average human lifespan or quality of life.
As far as I can see, we've spent zillions and zillions on DNA research, without a really big bang for the buck.
I was thinking about this very subject the other day.
It seems strange to me that while, in principle, the discovery of the structure of DNA was a wonderful thing, it doesn't seem to have affected the average person's life very much. Far less, it seems, then Dr. Fleming's noticing that bread mold contamination was killing his bacterial cultures.
Perhaps I'm missing something, and understanding the structure of DNA is contributing more than I think. But, it occurs to me that if we could put a man on the moon in about 10 years, we ought to be able to do something more with DNA in 50 years.
I suspect that science has become too bureaucratized and institutionalized to know which end is up anymore.
Sigh.
I'm told that somewhere between 95% and 93% of the fiber-optic 'net backbone is unused; sounds like AOL is trying to light most of it up!
However, there is the obvious (at least to me) problem of bandwidth to the home. The vast bulk of homes that do have broadband are sharing reasonably limited bandwidth with other homes. Streaming high-quality video to many people at once who are sharing moderate bandwith seems like a no-go. In otherwords, it seems to me that if the service catches on, they're dead; they'll have to strive for mediocrity.
Unless we put fiber into everyone's home. Yeah!
I'll keep my Tivo for now. One of the best things I ever purchased.
I know that I'll get yelled at by this crowd, but, without knowing more specifics on your application, I'd recommend PostgreSQL DB, a Visual Basic front end for forms, and perhaps Crystal Reports for reporting.
This will give you a nice blend of tremendous power and ease of use.
(It's a little more complex than the above description - but not too bad)
A friend of mine who designs buildings says that these are popular in Canada and Europe. The only downside is that they're so freakin' tough that you can't really rip hunks out if you decide to make additions later.
For some pictures see, for example,
www.logixicf.com/
(I'm not affiliated with them, and have no idea if this product is good - but the pictures are better than on the other sites I found)
..then it's almost certainly bogus, unless proven otherwise. Most of them wouldn't know the scientific method if it smacked them in the head.
Yes, the folks that gave us lobotomies, eletro-shock therapy, repressed memories (Are you *sure* your daycare teacher didn't do magic sex stuff to you? Really sure? Really really sure?), rampant ADHD and autism (over)diagnoses, along with less overtly harmful stuff like psychotherapy. All of these are based on pretend science -- no need for yucky stuff like experiments and control groups.
I was (too-subtly) alluding to my belief that the use of FORTRAN (a generally ridiculous tool to use these days) represents a symptom of an underlying disease: the intellectual vacuum that has proliferated in science. Years ago we had some smart folks. Now we have institutionalization, greed, lack of accountability, and general BS.
Try a little experiment: read a scientific paper from 30 or 40 years ago. It will likely be concise, readable, and thoughtful, with a real statement at the end that tells the reader the findings and the significance. Now read a scientific paper from the last 10 years. It will typically be incomprehensible, filled with faulty statistics, and will invariably end with some vague and meaningless statement of the findings, or lack thereof.
Argh!