if it's "bulk of the work" and requires "low skills" as you say, then a beowulf cluster of developers will help.
No, it won't; just because a task can be done by mediocre coders using a rather simple development methodology, you can't automatically speed it up by clustering lots of mediocre coders together. You can have a factory that houses several such teams, but making all of them work on the same code wouldn't be economical. You simply can't get a two-year project done in four months by emplying six or ten or twenty times as many coders. Absolutely no connection to the beowulf cluster analogy. Oh, and I referred to work that can be done by programmers with low skills, I didn't say it requires low skills;-p
gee... that beowulf thing seems ontopic for the first time
No, it's not. The article is about industrializing software development so the bulk of the work can be done by programmers with low skills (which most of them have anyway), not about speeding up development by throwing more wetware at it. Software development is largely non-paraliseable, so a beowulf cluster of developers won't help much. In fact the idea is rather insane.
For some reason, people who type instructions into machines have gotten into their heads that they are underappreciated artists or that there is something uniquely heroic about what they do. The vast bulk of programming is just repetition.
That's one possibility. You can hire a dozen code-monkeys and let them type instructions until the product resembles the works of shakespeare to a degree that is sufficient for your business model (a.k.a. the microsoft method). But if you're lucky, you can get software that fits the same specification written by one 'artist' who designs well thought out components and two or three people who put them together, test them, document them etc. And you'll get software that is much better maintaineable, reusable, etc.
Not every programmer who resents the idea of typing repetitive instructions all day has gone crazy. In fact if implementing your project requires lots of mindless, repetitive work, then your design decisions are crazy. The very term 'project' implies that you're doing something new you haven't done before.
Example: the cheap, unskilled code monkey spends lots of time repetitively building mediocre GUI components with his, err, GUI builder, while the 'artist' uses the same time to write a factory that constructs the GUI components on the fly, considering things like the data structures they'll edit etc. One central place to enforce consistency and human interface guidelines. No mindless repetition.
So why don't you _format_ your text to change all of your _words_ to words?
The underscores are easier and faster to type than the HTML tags. You might find them more annoying to read (I guess most people don't care; if that's wrong I'm willing to change my typing habits), but I find it annoying that the underscores aren't converted to HTML automagically -- the form allows the option 'HTML to text', but not the reverse.
By the way, I did _not_ use the <i> tag and I didn't mean the underscores to indicate italics, but _emphasis_. I see it as a semantic markup and don't feel compelled to make the mental effort of imagining the enclosed text chaning to italics. Maybe that's the difference because of which I find the underscores verys appropriate and not annoying at all.
Just because you don't have to use caps-lock, it doesn't mean that it is not useful for anything else.
There are even better examples than your data entry scenario, but only a tiny fraction of computer users run into these cases on a regular basis. I didn't intend to argue that the caps lock key is useless and we should get rid of it, I just meant to point out that it's absolutely _not_ generally useful for 'people who type a lot' and it's _not_ 'plenty useful' for the average user.
I don't look at the keyboard at all when I type. But it's pretty easy to see the green CAPS LOCK light in my peripheral vision, and that's enough feedback to tell whether it's on or off.
It's even easier to see that everything you type is in, you know, all caps. (Well, okay, I often type something and loke somewhere else entirely, like a book from which I'm copying a quote, or the TV, but when you're both concentrated and skilled enough to type like that, would you really hit the caps lock key by accident?)
Of course, when what you're keying in has a bunch of sentences in all caps, you'll sure as hell be glad to have that caps lock.
This is true, as long as you're talking about typewriters. On a computer, however, in the rare cases in which you really need to have a whole bunch of sentences in all caps, it's a matter of how you _format_ your text, not how you _enter_ it. You'll probably like to proofread what you just typed _before_ you put it in significantly less legible caps, so keying it in with caps lock on would be rather silly.
Eh, it's also very useful to people who type a lot,
No, it isn't. The cases in which a person in his/her right mind would like to type in all caps are rare and there is no significant correlation between how often you run into such cases and how much you type in general.
you often find times when you need to put things in all caps, it's still plenty useful.
No, you don't, therefore it isn't. I spent thousands of hours entering all kinds of text into all kinds of programs, and I never ever used caps lock in order to put something in all caps. I figure the key is most for people who find holding down shift while typing several letters difficult. Only rarely you really have to put a word in all caps; almost no one needs to put whole phrases in all caps. _Very_ few people need to make whole paragraphs all caps, e.g. with various kinds of legalese; however, this is about how you _format_ the text, not about how you _enter_ it.
When I used caps lock at all, it was mostly for playing games. E.g. when shift is 'run', I like caps lock to be 'always run' -- makes kind of sense.
Everyone in the Slashdot community seems so worried about the Microsoft monoculture, and yet here we are pushing linux into every possible niche. It can't be optimal to have the same OS running on both our calculators and our supercomputers.
I surely wouldn't buy an expensive calculator that runs out of batteries much faster than my PDA, but I'm glad that people are doing research in that area and maybe improve the system so it becomes easier on the hardware and cheaper; just as I think it's a good thing for Linux to be adapted fpor supercomputers, even though I won't ever have one. Imagine everyone would regard Linux as being strictly 'for PCs only' and then some company makes a Windows (CE) based calculator, and Microsoft says, "See? You can't use Linux for that!" I'd rather not grant them that satisfaction;-)
Even crappy 720x720 printers available for under US$100 lay down about 41Mpx for an 8x10.
This guy counted all of the little ink marks such a printer can make as individual 'pixels'; however, obviously you need quite a couple of such ink drops to represent a single pixel in the image printed. Inkjet printers are absolutely nowhere near a quality for which you'd have to invent the term 'gigapixels'.
As I already mentioned elsewhere, even inside the computing field, KiloByte does _not_ universally mean 1024 bytes. Exactly in order to end this confusion, engineers came up with new terms which are not ambiguous for a change. This is absolutely not about some 'laymen' (who couldn't care less about this subtle difference!) climbing up your noble ivory tower of geekery and wanting to dictate how to change your perfect domain-specific language. But even if you were right and there were some weird people who had their own language, independent of yours, and decided "well, we're gonna substitute the syllable BI whenever the base is BInary" (which at least makes an ounce of sense), why exactly would you request that _they_, in _their_ language, with which you don't want to have to do anything anyway, should handle it exactly the other way round instead?
Quite simply, 1000 bytes is almost totally useless as a measurement, so the original definition of a kilobyte was 1024 (2^10) bytes and a megabyte is 2^20 or 1024x1024 or 1048576 bytes.
As long as you're talking about hard disks, which organize data in clusters, which naturally have sizes that are 'round' numbers in the _binary_ system, you're right that 2^10 is a little more useful for measureing amounts of data than 10^3 is. Switching to the traditional decimal system really was a genuinely bad idea; they really only did that to screw customers over.
However, in other fields of computing, like networking where you have Mbps (megabits per second), it has always been customary to interpret kilo and mega as standing for factors of 1,000 and 1,000,000 respectively. So in order to know how many bits you're talking about exactly, you always had to be aware of which particular jargon you're using. Distinguishing between kilo and kibi is meant to clear this confusion up once and for all, and it's not Apple's idea and not the idea of some weird SI committee; it's the idea of the IEC. The prefixes they made up look and sound awful, but most of the time you're only talking about rough numbers and the subtle difference doesn't matter anyway, and for those cases in which you need the exact number if bits, I haven't seen a better idea yet.
A *kilo*byte is 1024 bytes. [...] A *mega*byte is (usually) 1024 kilobytes or 1,048,567 bytes. [...] What are they teaching Kids in schools these days?
They're teaching kids in schools exactly what you said -- because most teachers are old farts who spread outdated information. Actually calling 1024 'kilo' and 1024^2 'mega' has always been insider jargon that had little to do with the official definitions of these prefixes and never made much sense to outsiders, so the practice of using those prefixes for 1,000 and 1,000,000 (not really for 1,024,000 AFAIK) is spreading rapidly. What 1024 bytes are _really_ called now is a Kibibyte (abbr. KiB), while 1024^2 bytes are a Mebibyte (abbr. MiB).
Except in the case of definitions (eg, I know what a panda is), there is no practical difference between "believe" and "know." To the one who knows these things, they are equally true.
I was a bit lazy there, I should have made that more explicit. Where I said believe, the intended meaning was assuming something to be true, having faith in it because it suits you, only seeing evidence that seems to support it. Where I said know, the intended meaning was recognising the nature of something, being familiar with it, being aware of how certain exactly you can be of its factuality because you repeatedly challenged and tested it. When I formulated that, I was probably thinking too much in the mindset of a mathematician who just was told of a new fact (for which there can be an absolute proof in mathematics). For example, when I want to rely on a certain theorem in order to get some proof or calculation done, and someone tells me "it's okay, you can use that theorem", I can either see how it looks rather plausible and trust in the competence of that other mathematician, and believe that the theorem is correct, or I can verify it until I am sure it contains no mistakes and know that it's correct. In the real world, of course, that distinction is a lot more blurry, because we rather have to go for that 'beyond reasonable doubt' thing you mentioned.
Simple and plausible are a matter of opinion. You could argue for creation exactly the same way.
You could argue for creation by claiming that this fairy tale ('theory' would be too authoritative a word) is simple and plausible, but you would be wrong. The accepted theories about how our planet and life on it came into existence are consistent with just about anything natural scientists have found out so far. Well, okay, the more answers we find, the more questions we find, too. Questions about missing matter, dark energy, the string theory, stuff like that. But as far as anything that happens on our planet and is perceivable with our bare senses is concerned, natural science has pretty good and plausible explanations for that. Lots of questions that have been answered consistently and conclusively. With the Genesis, it's exactly the other way round. The religious types even go so far as to claim the existence of god cannot be proved exactly because god doesn't want that, and that it's more important to have faith and believe than to proof and know exactly because god says having faith is important and a Good Thing. You're totally right in saying that holding such opinions requires the proper background. Not every, say, catholic really takes the Genesis literally and truely believes life was created that way, and even fewer are complete and utter nutcases. But if someone is really interested in how the different species came into existence and is ready to do some research and ask some questions, and still comes to the conclusion that creationist theories sound plausible, s-/he must be totally brainwashed or really dumb. Disclaimer: I won't invest the time and energy required to argue that I'm not just saying this because I'm brainwashed and dumb. I'd love to, but I've got work to do, sorry.
Sigh... how can this be proven. How can the theory of evolution ever be proven. or will it always just be mans answer at removing God from science. Although i wonder what is so unnatural about God.
If you define the term 'proof' so strictly that something that survived such thourough challanges and scrutiny as the concept of evolution did is not proven by your terms, there's nothing much you can be really sure of. For example, how can you know that smoking really causes cancer? Maybe the statistics are all fake or the numbers have a totally unrelated cause, maybe there's a huge worldwide underground organisation that secretly influences scientists and spreads propaganda? You could believe in some weird story that is totally implausible and far-fetched, but just possible (e.g. something involving space aliens or higher beings), just as well as you could believe in some fancy god who is a sentient being that mucks around with evolutionary processes. Or, you could just go by what you know, and if there's a simple, plausible model of thought that has always worked and by every available evidence will continue to work, you could say, well, it's not proven in the exact mathematical sense, but for all practical purposes, it's proven enough. It would be sane to assume smoking is bad for your health. It would be sane to assume that temperatures will drop when winter comes and that it would be nice to have a couple of pullovers by then. Just in the same way, it's a good idea to assume evolution takes place. On the other hand, believing in god and creationist fairy tales is, if you view it objectively and leave concerns imposed by history and society out of consideration, utterly nutty. Of course the idea of god was contrived by humans, exactly like pullovers, cigarettes, clothes for dogs and atomic bombs. It's a bit of an issue of definition what you call 'natural'.
Mars. Europa. Eroticon Six. Those would be completely independent.
We can't actually know that. Perhaps the very same entities from the furure who came back in time to Eroticon Six in order to mine the excess heat energy generated by the tourists coming to see the Triple Breasted Whore also wioll haven retro-be mining Mars to get... err, on-forewhen pregetting ice-cubes for their gargle blasters.
As far as I know, we don't. Evolution happens in leaps rather than continuously; isn't DNA supposed to be subject to larger, sudden changes as well? And how should we know much about evolution in a completely separate ecosystem?
Asperger's is not a minor handicap. Nor does it cause introversion.
I have never knowingly talked to someone with significantly severe AS, so if I did today, I might think he's just dumb and avoid him in the future. I can imagine a lot of people are like that. It seems plausible that the poor guy would have a hard time finding friends and eventually give up, becoming quasi-introverted. No?
Then again, I don't know of anybody actually using Babelfish for anything other than cheap entertainment.
If it only were so, we could all be happy with babelfish as it is, but there are lots of people out there who give us babelfished text and claim these were actual translations. Besides 'i18n-ised' applications, we also see that in slashdot stories about articles in foreign languages. Often the fish is good enough so you can see what an article is about and get the basic scoop, so while it would be better if the person who originally read the article and speaks the language it's written in would have provided a proper translation or at least an abstract in proper English, it can be useful if an article features a 'babelfish' link that is called thus. But it itches me to click on a link that is called 'translation', only to find out it isn't. In these situations, I ask myself if the person who postet that is basically monolingual and clueless about the quality of the MT, or just otherworldly lazy. And maybe the knowledge that there are people who read those MT texts and don't think "it hurts, make it stop!" is what makes them so funny?
Let's see how babelfish translates a German version written by a human translator who knows what he's doing back into English:
Hallo. Ich bin im Irak. Meine Gitter-Koordinaten sind XY76543421 und ich glaube, dass ich moglicher Weise auf einen Typen schiesse, der auf den einzigen Baum da draussen schifft.
->
Hello. I am in the Iraq. My grid coordinates are XY76543421 and I believe the fact that I shoot possible way at types which on the only tree there outside sails.
This was a public service announcement for all the idiots up there (I'm displaying oldest comments first) who think foo -> bar -> foo translation tests are useless and that MT works a lot better at just translating foo -> bar. It doesn't.
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Oh, and I referred to work that can be done by programmers with low skills, I didn't say it requires low skills
Not every programmer who resents the idea of typing repetitive instructions all day has gone crazy. In fact if implementing your project requires lots of mindless, repetitive work, then your design decisions are crazy. The very term 'project' implies that you're doing something new you haven't done before.
Example: the cheap, unskilled code monkey spends lots of time repetitively building mediocre GUI components with his, err, GUI builder, while the 'artist' uses the same time to write a factory that constructs the GUI components on the fly, considering things like the data structures they'll edit etc. One central place to enforce consistency and human interface guidelines. No mindless repetition.
push out better software, do it faster, employ mediocre 'mass production' coders for low pay: pick any two.
By the way, I did _not_ use the <i> tag and I didn't mean the underscores to indicate italics, but _emphasis_. I see it as a semantic markup and don't feel compelled to make the mental effort of imagining the enclosed text chaning to italics. Maybe that's the difference because of which I find the underscores verys appropriate and not annoying at all.
When I used caps lock at all, it was mostly for playing games. E.g. when shift is 'run', I like caps lock to be 'always run' -- makes kind of sense.
However, in other fields of computing, like networking where you have Mbps (megabits per second), it has always been customary to interpret kilo and mega as standing for factors of 1,000 and 1,000,000 respectively. So in order to know how many bits you're talking about exactly, you always had to be aware of which particular jargon you're using. Distinguishing between kilo and kibi is meant to clear this confusion up once and for all, and it's not Apple's idea and not the idea of some weird SI committee; it's the idea of the IEC. The prefixes they made up look and sound awful, but most of the time you're only talking about rough numbers and the subtle difference doesn't matter anyway, and for those cases in which you need the exact number if bits, I haven't seen a better idea yet.
Let's see how babelfish translates a German version written by a human translator who knows what he's doing back into English:
Hallo. Ich bin im Irak. Meine Gitter-Koordinaten sind XY76543421 und ich glaube, dass ich moglicher Weise auf einen Typen schiesse, der auf den einzigen Baum da draussen schifft.
->
Hello. I am in the Iraq. My grid coordinates are XY76543421 and I believe the fact that I shoot possible way at types which on the only tree there outside sails.
This was a public service announcement for all the idiots up there (I'm displaying oldest comments first) who think foo -> bar -> foo translation tests are useless and that MT works a lot better at just translating foo -> bar. It doesn't.