My computer works. But if I turn it off, and then turn it on again some time later, the POST screen never comes on. Either I get a blank screen or a screen with red text that says my ATI needs to be connected to a power source (hdd style power cable).
At first, I thought this was a connection issue. I would open the box, wiggle the board, wiggle the power cable. Switch the power cables... and after a certain mysterious combination, it would work. And no problems then on.
Then one day, I turned on my computer, and I had to do something. It just sat there with a black screen. I came back and restarted it and it just worked.
That is when I think I understood what the problem is: I say it must be a capacitor the doesn't fill up fast enough on initial boot that makes the card think that it's not connected to a power source. But if you leave it on for a few minutes to 'warm up', it just works. Of course, the fiddling around masked the fact that it was staying on for that crucial amount of time, and made me think that the voodoo was that.
It's still all conjecture, but yeah, that's my voodoo.
Actually, system is not a true process and you can not kill it.
However, killing winlogon will instantly shut off your computer. That's because the kernel launches and does a "WaitForSingleObject on the Winlogon process. As soon as winlogon exits, the kernel shuts down.
Not only that, he probably still had his rolse royce and 3 mansions and airplane, and now that he's dead, his family's inherited it all, and there's nobody left to sue.
I'm already jaded as it is, bu tthis is like a cherry on top of the whipped cream.
The last thing you ever want to do when asked by a manager is give a off the cuff answer. It will almost always be wrong.
So what do I do when I get asked how long something will take? Well, to start off, if I know the code in and out, and I'm aware of the bug, then I can actually estimate what amount of time it will take. If it's not a bug, but something to be developed, and I've done the exact same thing before in my career, I already know the answer.
If however, neither of these are the case (which is about 98% of the time), I say this: "It'll take me roughly x hours to investigate this matter further and only after that will I be able to give you a timeline that is accurate."
First off, that gives you way more credibility, and way more leeway. But second, it lets you dive into the situation without having committed your life to fixing it, until you get a better grip on what's going on. If I were for example dealing with a bug on a web app (the kind I regularly work on these days), I would say something like "It'll take me 4 hours to investigate". I will most likely start with about an hour spent understanding the scope and possibly the history of the bug. "Is it reproducible?" is the most important question. If it is intermittent, I will commit to nothing at this point. If I look at the code and can see what is causing the problem, that is, if I can see a clear cause and effect chain that agrees with the test cases etc, I rely on my prior experience and make a guess at how much code needs changing. Plan for it, and plan conservatively. *DON'T* rewrite the application. Only fix the problem.
If you have time left on your initial x hours, start fixing the problem. See how it goes. Does it look like it's just going to keep on going like this until you fix it, or are you finding your being faced with odd and quirky behaviour left right and center? If you have weird behaviour, beware! If you have undocumented libraries/APIs behaving weirdly, beware! Don't get caught with your pants down. Let your manager know that you are passing some data down to the J2EE/COM/.NET/.Salsa/<NameYourCustomFramework> and that it is not acting as expected.
For actual development, the process is slightly different. Assess what needs to be done exactly in the same way as above (give an initial x hours to investigate). See what actually needs to be done. *DON'T* rewrite the STL library or.NET framework to do it. Choose the quickest cleanest path with the least amount of development time. Look at all your prior experience: have you previously used STL? Do you know it like the back of your palm? Have you only briefly used COM? And have you had issues with it the times you did use it? Keep that in mind. Try to steer the project in your domain of expertise. Put that as a coefficient in your estimation. If you know you have 100 lines or so of code to write using a library that you know in and out, estimate what you think it will take. If you will have to use a library that you're not really familiar with, pad it like crazy. I mean 2-3-4 times what you expect.
Those are the practical comments, there's also the more theoretical stuff:
Don't confuse accuracy and precision. And don't let your managers confuse the two. If I am asked to guestimate a project timeline, saying "4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 5 hours, 23 minutes" is more precise but radically less accurate than "4 months". Yeah, it sounds stupid, but accuracy != precision. Don't forget that. Tattoo it on your hand if you must. The longer a duration, the less precise it should be. Commiting to February 5th is ok if you are in January, it is not ok if you are in August. If you are in august, you must commit to a month coming up, and warn your managers to give it leeway. Just cause you said "it'll be done in february", doesn't mean they should plan a launch on February 18th.
The other thing is a little concept that I really like in comp sci algorithmics: divide and conqu
I mean he was poor until he got into the Kirov Ballet. Once the soviet government knew they had a jewel in their hands, of course they pampered him... They made him a king by his own standards so that he wouldn't defect.
But to come back to what you originally said: it wasn't because he was in upper class that he got into the Kirov ballet. It was because he was a talented dancer, who btw did not even fit the body measurement requirements to be a soloist dancer. He slept on wooden floors when he was young because they (russian dancers) thought it would promote growth (he was too short).
He's one of the rare exceptions that was made to the rules because he was just simply so talented.
Aside from that, Pushkin took him under his wing and treated him like a son. (who he had done to Nureyev previously).
But to recap, he didn't get into Kirov because he was rich, or even upper class. If you google his biography, you'll see his father was an engineer and his mother a seamstress.
New Orleans is where it is because the dikes weren't up to spec. In an ideal world, that would mean: the company doing the dikes would get sued. And pay for the damages incurred to New Orleans. Unfortunately, the dikes were partially built by the army core - who repeatedly said the dikes weren't up to spec - and partially by sub-contractors picked by wealthy people like George Bush himself.
Look, I don't disagree with your last point on democracy, and we are starting to spiral towards a neutral ground. *But*, I stand by the fact that capitalism is a market method/theory, it has no concept of moral value. No more than chemistry has a concept of morals and ethics. If killing people would result in profits, a capitalist corporation would do it. They routinely do in fact. When killing people by contaminating rivers amounts to x dollars of fines, they make a very lucid accounting choice of "will it cost us more to pay these fines or to actually treat our waste".
Nowhere in that equation is there human life. Just money. And until we can resurect human life with just money, that will keep on meaning that Capitalism is amoral, (not immoral) and hence open to arbitrary good as well as bad.
Where do you get your frigging facts. Baryshnikov was poor.
But aside from that, the ballet's elitism was not with respects to the class you belonged to, it was with respect to your body. You had to be a cookie cutter model of what a perfect ballet should be. Same for the girls.
Democracy as a primary is always immoral. This is why the US is a constitutionally limited federation
Ahem, "this is why" ? That would make sense if the US was the land of the free buddy. You really think you're the land of the free? Look at yourself, you've bought the propaganda so much you've come to think democracy is bad.
Capitalism says that no two people do anything unless they both see that they derive a benefit.
My point exactly: George Bush and the oil company CEOs, they strike a deal. They both benefit from it, yeah? In the meantime, the entirety of New Orleans is left flooded. And with no electricity for over 6 months. (Just google it up if you don't believe me)
"Let the market decide" means that something happens only if a group or individual is willing to voluntarily take on the burden of making it happen.
Oh so you think the poor people aren't taking action because they're unwilling to take the burden??! "A group of individuals taking the burden of making something happen" translates in this world to a person who has the *capital* to make things happen. Land owners. Capital owners.
Buddy, go read up on what Capitalism means. Quoting from the second line of that text: "In a capitalist economic system, capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital. "
I mean if you are naive enough to believe that the US has got it all right, be my guest. But Capitalism is a theory that has a foundation and some thought that has been put into it. Don't just redefine words for the sake of your demagogy.
Here's a question to you: do *you* have the guts to take up the burden of supplying 6 months of *municipal* electricity? Do you? Are you seriously thinking in your little brain "I could if I wanted to, but I don't want to?". Let me answer for you: no. You don't. You have no power, you are nothing.
Capitalism is about making as much money as possible. Capitalism's value system is simply: does it make money, if so, it's good.
What do you think "let the market decide" means? Do you think it means that people are voting? Because if that's so, it gives an aweful lot of voting power to the richer class... the *capital owners*.
All good points, and believe me, I'm no stranger to most of these.
The only thing that I'm starting to contest in my own life and that I see more and more openly is our notion of what is enough, what is success. We have gotten to a stage where just simply living - e.g. surviving - is considered bad. We constantly force ourselves to achieve more and bigger, and in the process we have lost sight that just surviving is an achievement just as good.
Look at it this way: that last paragraph probably seems very unambitious, right? Well, see it this way: I've come to realize that whether I make 80k a year or 10k a year, I can always manage to be unhappy. The real success is taking what you've got and being happy and present in it.
Einstein was a file clerk at the patent office when he came up with Relativity. I'm not saying anyone else needs to do the same, but I am saying that if you chose to live your life 'fully', you can live it in almost any circumstance. If you like soldering cabinets together, then do it. If you don't like soldering cabinets, then don't.
All of these things on how fully you live your life, or how much quality there is in your life are thoroughly independant of how much you make.
So, if String Theorists have had to solder baskets together, they still can't blame funding... look at the russian ballet academy that made giants like Nureyev and Baryshnikov. They toiled, and yet they are the best.
Anyways, I don't disagree with you personally... It's just my personal rant these days.
Well, capitalism is a market model. It shouldn't be an market/ethics/morals model. People have turned their values and beliefs into a capitalistic system. That's not what it's designed for.
That's the problem with America. "Does it make money?" is the only predicate by which quality of life is measured.
"Get rich or die tryin'"... it's not just a movie about hoodlams, it's about every 'decent' American person. If a person is pursuing something that isn't about making money, he's not decent. He's a misfit.
Well buddy, I'm sorry but if you prefer working at a company like Enron or Cytrix or I don't know what other IT company you work for, where your daily job involves producing absolutely nothing of value and consider that this is better than being involved in something you believe in, that's too bad. No matter how much you get paid.
Our times have become a merry go round of making money so we can numb ourselves playing xbox and watching bullshit hollywood crap because we are bored out of our minds from our real lives.
And btw, what the f*#$ is this dream of moving into management?! Who dreams of being a manager? What kid says: "I want to learn to be a firefighter so I can one day sit at a desk and tell someone else to do it." WTF?!?!
Uhm, just a matter of mathematical stickling here: f(x) = 2x does not verify anything. At least not mathematically.
By that same verification, for any even number x, there's an odd number x+1>x. Hence, there are more odd numbers.
The real problem is that the symbol infinity is a symbol, not a number. And its meaning is not really at all related to 'big numbers'. It's meaning is tied to limits which have a formal definition which can be intuitively understood by pretending that inifinity is a large number.
The point is that statistical evidence is not the same as deduced logic. Not that newtonian physics is a sham.
Plus, to disprove your point, the 1001st experiment in this class was when relativism was 'discovered' and classical newtonian phyisics no longer applied in certain cases.
The important idea here is that fact precedes theory, not the other way around. If a fact doesn't match your theory, it's the theory that's disproven. That's not the case in Math. There are no experiments, a mathematical theory, once proven is forever proven. A physics theory is a model that matches observed fact as well as it can, until something more appropriate supersedes it.
The thing about both math and philosophy is that they are closed systems of ideas. They don't require material proof.
Descartes rationalism is as valid a system as Humes empiricism. Just as Euclidian geometry is as valid as spherical geometry. They are systems that are built on axioms and the proof or disproof of things occur within these systems.
Neither math nor philosophy can really assert anything about the real world... in theory =)
But in general, it's apple. All of these people are certified by apple, they are enacting Apple's will, and while they are polite and courteous, they do apply the apple policy: when I asked them about the whining noise, they said "oh yeah, Apple doesn't recognize this as a problem officially".
In other words, they know about it, Apple most probably knows about it, but officially, it's not a problem and we shouldn't be worried about it. I don't like those jedi mindtricks. When I say my computer is freezing up, or my computer is making a high pitch noise, I know it is. So say "we don't have a fix yet", but not "that's not true".
This is especially problematic since Apple is a hardware vendor.
Buddy. Mathematics along with Philosophy are the only two pure 'sciences' known to man. Everything else is 'unverifiable'.
As Hume said it: just because I saw a cue ball hit a nine ball at a certain angle 1000 time, it doesn't mean I can predict the outcome of the 1001st experiment.
Aside from that, the Math that is actually used in physics has always been derivative results.
Math is to Physics what Physics is to Engineering, a simple application.
This is not to denigrate physics. Nor engineering.
The reason why ST is different from Newtonian, Maxwell's EM, relativistic or even quantum physics is not that it's more a mathematical model or some such thing...
It's simply because each one of these theories were postulated starting from physical events, a model was conceived and using this model, we were able to predict phenomenons that we had yet not experienced.
Case in hand: back in Newton's time, there were no air hockey tables. There wasn't anything that would make people think that an object would continue in a straight line at the same velocity if not interfered by any outside force. Try telling a medieval man that the mule and ox pulling his cart were only doing so to counter the force of friction on the wheel axle. He would laugh at you. Turns out, pretty much everything from going to the moon to airplanes could be explained if not predicted using newtonian theory.
Maxwell, using nothing but simple equations not only 'found out' that light had a maximum speed, he measured the said speed. He's also the one who came up with e=mc^2, although he didn't quite know what that meant.
Einsteins relativity. No need for an example.
Quantum? As far fetched and sci-fi as quantum is, it explained how tainted glass can possibly be (something which made no sense in classical physics), it also predicted transistors (by the same tunelling principle).
ST on the other hand, is a very very highly indirect 'theory' in which there has been practically no observation, and no verifiable predictions made. It's all underneath the cloak of the "too small to be verified". Which, when you really look at it, means it's on the same level as mysticism: as systematic as it might be inside of its confines, you have to first start by believing in it.
All this being said, I'm not taking sides. I do hope that they eventually find something of relevance from it. I know a few people at least who've put their live's work into this.
var list = oRequest.responseXML.firstChild.getElementsByTagNa me( 'entry' ); //... list[i].data list[i].getAttribute('typ e')
I use this to return very 'tabular' XML data on pages. I have a super lightweight library that handles all Ajax calls to the server. The results page always sends either a <success> node filled with data, or an <error> filled with error information.
The main advantage is really debugging and readability. I can check the XML pages with browser and see if it's sending out the proper data. Other advantages including using existing XML software, like for example SQL Server's SELECT... FOR XML clause which dumps a query out in XML format, or using XMLDOM objects to format out data.
Yeah, that's what they were arguing too. The problem: I consider it an OS vulnerability if a program I'm running can halt my entire system (whether out of neglect or malice doesn't matter, does it?)
Your point about MS is off target: MS doesn't keep old functionality to keep its OS from functioning, it keeps around old functionality to not break badly written apps - that's a choice that you can chose to say is unnecessary. But it is completely a different class of problems. Any OS that can be crippled by a simple user mode application has a serious flaw.
Frankly, I guess this points out that the MacBook Pro isn't "above" anything else.
Well, I'm a long time Microsoft'y, in that I've worked mainly on windows platforms (professionally) for the last decade. I just recently got a mac book pro. I'll tell you this much: I looked for a LONG time for a PC laptop that I could get instead. The only thing that came near in ergonomy was the LG laptops which were ridiculously overpriced. I mean, compare a Dell laptop (which looks like a tank) to a macbook pro, i.e. hold both in your hands, and you will see there is an order of magnitude in difference.
That being said, there are aspects of my Macbook that I am surprisingly disappointed about. Namely: Apple.
From everything I had read - especially anti microsoft bashing comparing how Windows has so many bugs etc - Apple is unbelievably bad at both hardware and software tech support.
Examples: there is a high pitch whining noise that comes from the MacBook Pros. It is quite obviously an electrical leak, which consistently goes away if you switch off the second core. Apple has yet to *officially* acknowledge this problem. It's one thing to acknowledge, it's another thing to replace. They could easily say "yeah, sorry, that's not repairable", but it's quite insulting to go to an authorized dealer and say "there, don't you hear it? it's driving me insane" and get an answer "uhm, sorry, no, I don't hear it". Same for AppleCare.
Speaking of apple care, they treat their custommers like idiots. I had a problem with my fan making a rattling noise - clearly a ball bearing problem. I call apple care, it was so loud she could hear it on the phone without my even putting the phone up to the laptop. I was just laughing when she took me step by step through how to put the installation CD in, boot off of it, and run checkdisk (which btw, yielded all green, to which she grunted in disappointment - I guess people shut off their computers often enough that they always get red warnings about filesystem problems...) Anyways...
And last but not least, they recently came out with a patch for Quicktime that would effectively freeze your entire UI if you ran certain programs. When contacting AppleCare, they asked me which program did this, and I said "Unrar", "Graphviz" and "Adobe apps", to which his 'straight faced' reply was: we're sorry, Apple can not take responsability for third party software. Which is preposterous because it wasn't the third party software failing so much as the *entire* OS freezing up.
They later reissued a new patch that fixed this problem - but Apple *never* admitted that their initial fix was broken.
All of this is that kind of stuff that would turn into a flame storm for Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
My computer works. But if I turn it off, and then turn it on again some time later, the POST screen never comes on. Either I get a blank screen or a screen with red text that says my ATI needs to be connected to a power source (hdd style power cable).
At first, I thought this was a connection issue. I would open the box, wiggle the board, wiggle the power cable. Switch the power cables... and after a certain mysterious combination, it would work. And no problems then on.
Then one day, I turned on my computer, and I had to do something. It just sat there with a black screen. I came back and restarted it and it just worked.
That is when I think I understood what the problem is: I say it must be a capacitor the doesn't fill up fast enough on initial boot that makes the card think that it's not connected to a power source. But if you leave it on for a few minutes to 'warm up', it just works. Of course, the fiddling around masked the fact that it was staying on for that crucial amount of time, and made me think that the voodoo was that.
It's still all conjecture, but yeah, that's my voodoo.
Btw, it's "Tut mir leid". not "mit".
Some people just try too hard...
Yeah, cause all test subjects are litterate and educated people who aren't starving in their regular lives.
Actually, system is not a true process and you can not kill it.
However, killing winlogon will instantly shut off your computer. That's because the kernel launches and does a "WaitForSingleObject on the Winlogon process. As soon as winlogon exits, the kernel shuts down.
I'm already jaded as it is, bu tthis is like a cherry on top of the whipped cream.
The last thing you ever want to do when asked by a manager is give a off the cuff answer. It will almost always be wrong.
So what do I do when I get asked how long something will take? Well, to start off, if I know the code in and out, and I'm aware of the bug, then I can actually estimate what amount of time it will take. If it's not a bug, but something to be developed, and I've done the exact same thing before in my career, I already know the answer.
If however, neither of these are the case (which is about 98% of the time), I say this: "It'll take me roughly x hours to investigate this matter further and only after that will I be able to give you a timeline that is accurate."
First off, that gives you way more credibility, and way more leeway. But second, it lets you dive into the situation without having committed your life to fixing it, until you get a better grip on what's going on. If I were for example dealing with a bug on a web app (the kind I regularly work on these days), I would say something like "It'll take me 4 hours to investigate". I will most likely start with about an hour spent understanding the scope and possibly the history of the bug. "Is it reproducible?" is the most important question. If it is intermittent, I will commit to nothing at this point. If I look at the code and can see what is causing the problem, that is, if I can see a clear cause and effect chain that agrees with the test cases etc, I rely on my prior experience and make a guess at how much code needs changing. Plan for it, and plan conservatively. *DON'T* rewrite the application. Only fix the problem.
If you have time left on your initial x hours, start fixing the problem. See how it goes. Does it look like it's just going to keep on going like this until you fix it, or are you finding your being faced with odd and quirky behaviour left right and center? If you have weird behaviour, beware! If you have undocumented libraries/APIs behaving weirdly, beware! Don't get caught with your pants down. Let your manager know that you are passing some data down to the J2EE/COM/.NET/.Salsa/<NameYourCustomFramework> and that it is not acting as expected.
For actual development, the process is slightly different. Assess what needs to be done exactly in the same way as above (give an initial x hours to investigate). See what actually needs to be done. *DON'T* rewrite the STL library or .NET framework to do it. Choose the quickest cleanest path with the least amount of development time. Look at all your prior experience: have you previously used STL? Do you know it like the back of your palm? Have you only briefly used COM? And have you had issues with it the times you did use it? Keep that in mind. Try to steer the project in your domain of expertise. Put that as a coefficient in your estimation. If you know you have 100 lines or so of code to write using a library that you know in and out, estimate what you think it will take. If you will have to use a library that you're not really familiar with, pad it like crazy. I mean 2-3-4 times what you expect.
Those are the practical comments, there's also the more theoretical stuff:
Don't confuse accuracy and precision. And don't let your managers confuse the two. If I am asked to guestimate a project timeline, saying "4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 5 hours, 23 minutes" is more precise but radically less accurate than "4 months". Yeah, it sounds stupid, but accuracy != precision. Don't forget that. Tattoo it on your hand if you must. The longer a duration, the less precise it should be. Commiting to February 5th is ok if you are in January, it is not ok if you are in August. If you are in august, you must commit to a month coming up, and warn your managers to give it leeway. Just cause you said "it'll be done in february", doesn't mean they should plan a launch on February 18th.
The other thing is a little concept that I really like in comp sci algorithmics: divide and conqu
But to come back to what you originally said: it wasn't because he was in upper class that he got into the Kirov ballet. It was because he was a talented dancer, who btw did not even fit the body measurement requirements to be a soloist dancer. He slept on wooden floors when he was young because they (russian dancers) thought it would promote growth (he was too short).
He's one of the rare exceptions that was made to the rules because he was just simply so talented.
Aside from that, Pushkin took him under his wing and treated him like a son. (who he had done to Nureyev previously).
But to recap, he didn't get into Kirov because he was rich, or even upper class. If you google his biography, you'll see his father was an engineer and his mother a seamstress.
Look, I don't disagree with your last point on democracy, and we are starting to spiral towards a neutral ground. *But*, I stand by the fact that capitalism is a market method/theory, it has no concept of moral value. No more than chemistry has a concept of morals and ethics. If killing people would result in profits, a capitalist corporation would do it. They routinely do in fact. When killing people by contaminating rivers amounts to x dollars of fines, they make a very lucid accounting choice of "will it cost us more to pay these fines or to actually treat our waste".
Nowhere in that equation is there human life. Just money. And until we can resurect human life with just money, that will keep on meaning that Capitalism is amoral, (not immoral) and hence open to arbitrary good as well as bad.
But aside from that, the ballet's elitism was not with respects to the class you belonged to, it was with respect to your body. You had to be a cookie cutter model of what a perfect ballet should be. Same for the girls.
Ahem, "this is why" ? That would make sense if the US was the land of the free buddy. You really think you're the land of the free? Look at yourself, you've bought the propaganda so much you've come to think democracy is bad.
Capitalism says that no two people do anything unless they both see that they derive a benefit.
My point exactly: George Bush and the oil company CEOs, they strike a deal. They both benefit from it, yeah? In the meantime, the entirety of New Orleans is left flooded. And with no electricity for over 6 months. (Just google it up if you don't believe me)
"Let the market decide" means that something happens only if a group or individual is willing to voluntarily take on the burden of making it happen.
Oh so you think the poor people aren't taking action because they're unwilling to take the burden??! "A group of individuals taking the burden of making something happen" translates in this world to a person who has the *capital* to make things happen. Land owners. Capital owners.
Buddy, go read up on what Capitalism means. Quoting from the second line of that text: "In a capitalist economic system, capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital. "
I mean if you are naive enough to believe that the US has got it all right, be my guest. But Capitalism is a theory that has a foundation and some thought that has been put into it. Don't just redefine words for the sake of your demagogy.
Here's a question to you: do *you* have the guts to take up the burden of supplying 6 months of *municipal* electricity? Do you? Are you seriously thinking in your little brain "I could if I wanted to, but I don't want to?". Let me answer for you: no. You don't. You have no power, you are nothing.
Capitalism is about making as much money as possible. Capitalism's value system is simply: does it make money, if so, it's good.
What do you think "let the market decide" means? Do you think it means that people are voting? Because if that's so, it gives an aweful lot of voting power to the richer class... the *capital owners*.
In that sense, they have the same cardinality as N.
I guess the bijection shows that they are isomorphic hence have the same domains...
In any case, I stand corrected, my point was just that that statement so loosely qualified would open up a plethora of unmathematical proofs...
The only thing that I'm starting to contest in my own life and that I see more and more openly is our notion of what is enough, what is success. We have gotten to a stage where just simply living - e.g. surviving - is considered bad. We constantly force ourselves to achieve more and bigger, and in the process we have lost sight that just surviving is an achievement just as good.
Look at it this way: that last paragraph probably seems very unambitious, right? Well, see it this way: I've come to realize that whether I make 80k a year or 10k a year, I can always manage to be unhappy. The real success is taking what you've got and being happy and present in it.
Einstein was a file clerk at the patent office when he came up with Relativity. I'm not saying anyone else needs to do the same, but I am saying that if you chose to live your life 'fully', you can live it in almost any circumstance. If you like soldering cabinets together, then do it. If you don't like soldering cabinets, then don't.
All of these things on how fully you live your life, or how much quality there is in your life are thoroughly independant of how much you make.
So, if String Theorists have had to solder baskets together, they still can't blame funding... look at the russian ballet academy that made giants like Nureyev and Baryshnikov. They toiled, and yet they are the best.
Anyways, I don't disagree with you personally... It's just my personal rant these days.
Well, capitalism is a market model. It shouldn't be an market/ethics/morals model. People have turned their values and beliefs into a capitalistic system. That's not what it's designed for.
"Get rich or die tryin'"... it's not just a movie about hoodlams, it's about every 'decent' American person. If a person is pursuing something that isn't about making money, he's not decent. He's a misfit.
Well buddy, I'm sorry but if you prefer working at a company like Enron or Cytrix or I don't know what other IT company you work for, where your daily job involves producing absolutely nothing of value and consider that this is better than being involved in something you believe in, that's too bad. No matter how much you get paid.
Our times have become a merry go round of making money so we can numb ourselves playing xbox and watching bullshit hollywood crap because we are bored out of our minds from our real lives.
And btw, what the f*#$ is this dream of moving into management?! Who dreams of being a manager? What kid says: "I want to learn to be a firefighter so I can one day sit at a desk and tell someone else to do it." WTF?!?!
</rant>
By that same verification, for any even number x, there's an odd number x+1>x. Hence, there are more odd numbers.
The real problem is that the symbol infinity is a symbol, not a number. And its meaning is not really at all related to 'big numbers'. It's meaning is tied to limits which have a formal definition which can be intuitively understood by pretending that inifinity is a large number.
Plus, to disprove your point, the 1001st experiment in this class was when relativism was 'discovered' and classical newtonian phyisics no longer applied in certain cases.
The important idea here is that fact precedes theory, not the other way around. If a fact doesn't match your theory, it's the theory that's disproven. That's not the case in Math. There are no experiments, a mathematical theory, once proven is forever proven. A physics theory is a model that matches observed fact as well as it can, until something more appropriate supersedes it.
Descartes rationalism is as valid a system as Humes empiricism. Just as Euclidian geometry is as valid as spherical geometry. They are systems that are built on axioms and the proof or disproof of things occur within these systems.
Neither math nor philosophy can really assert anything about the real world... in theory =)
But in general, it's apple. All of these people are certified by apple, they are enacting Apple's will, and while they are polite and courteous, they do apply the apple policy: when I asked them about the whining noise, they said "oh yeah, Apple doesn't recognize this as a problem officially".
In other words, they know about it, Apple most probably knows about it, but officially, it's not a problem and we shouldn't be worried about it. I don't like those jedi mindtricks. When I say my computer is freezing up, or my computer is making a high pitch noise, I know it is. So say "we don't have a fix yet", but not "that's not true".
This is especially problematic since Apple is a hardware vendor.
As Hume said it: just because I saw a cue ball hit a nine ball at a certain angle 1000 time, it doesn't mean I can predict the outcome of the 1001st experiment.
Aside from that, the Math that is actually used in physics has always been derivative results.
Math is to Physics what Physics is to Engineering, a simple application.
This is not to denigrate physics. Nor engineering.
It's simply because each one of these theories were postulated starting from physical events, a model was conceived and using this model, we were able to predict phenomenons that we had yet not experienced.
Case in hand: back in Newton's time, there were no air hockey tables. There wasn't anything that would make people think that an object would continue in a straight line at the same velocity if not interfered by any outside force. Try telling a medieval man that the mule and ox pulling his cart were only doing so to counter the force of friction on the wheel axle. He would laugh at you. Turns out, pretty much everything from going to the moon to airplanes could be explained if not predicted using newtonian theory.
Maxwell, using nothing but simple equations not only 'found out' that light had a maximum speed, he measured the said speed. He's also the one who came up with e=mc^2, although he didn't quite know what that meant.
Einsteins relativity. No need for an example.
Quantum? As far fetched and sci-fi as quantum is, it explained how tainted glass can possibly be (something which made no sense in classical physics), it also predicted transistors (by the same tunelling principle).
ST on the other hand, is a very very highly indirect 'theory' in which there has been practically no observation, and no verifiable predictions made. It's all underneath the cloak of the "too small to be verified". Which, when you really look at it, means it's on the same level as mysticism: as systematic as it might be inside of its confines, you have to first start by believing in it.
All this being said, I'm not taking sides. I do hope that they eventually find something of relevance from it. I know a few people at least who've put their live's work into this.
I use this to return very 'tabular' XML data on pages. I have a super lightweight library that handles all Ajax calls to the server. The results page always sends either a <success> node filled with data, or an <error> filled with error information.
The main advantage is really debugging and readability. I can check the XML pages with browser and see if it's sending out the proper data. Other advantages including using existing XML software, like for example SQL Server's SELECT... FOR XML clause which dumps a query out in XML format, or using XMLDOM objects to format out data.
Your point about MS is off target: MS doesn't keep old functionality to keep its OS from functioning, it keeps around old functionality to not break badly written apps - that's a choice that you can chose to say is unnecessary. But it is completely a different class of problems. Any OS that can be crippled by a simple user mode application has a serious flaw.
I've never sent anything but XML. Once you get a grip on how to parse it on client side, the server side being XML is so much more useful.
Well, I'm a long time Microsoft'y, in that I've worked mainly on windows platforms (professionally) for the last decade. I just recently got a mac book pro. I'll tell you this much: I looked for a LONG time for a PC laptop that I could get instead. The only thing that came near in ergonomy was the LG laptops which were ridiculously overpriced. I mean, compare a Dell laptop (which looks like a tank) to a macbook pro, i.e. hold both in your hands, and you will see there is an order of magnitude in difference.
That being said, there are aspects of my Macbook that I am surprisingly disappointed about. Namely: Apple.
From everything I had read - especially anti microsoft bashing comparing how Windows has so many bugs etc - Apple is unbelievably bad at both hardware and software tech support.
Examples: there is a high pitch whining noise that comes from the MacBook Pros. It is quite obviously an electrical leak, which consistently goes away if you switch off the second core. Apple has yet to *officially* acknowledge this problem. It's one thing to acknowledge, it's another thing to replace. They could easily say "yeah, sorry, that's not repairable", but it's quite insulting to go to an authorized dealer and say "there, don't you hear it? it's driving me insane" and get an answer "uhm, sorry, no, I don't hear it". Same for AppleCare.
Speaking of apple care, they treat their custommers like idiots. I had a problem with my fan making a rattling noise - clearly a ball bearing problem. I call apple care, it was so loud she could hear it on the phone without my even putting the phone up to the laptop. I was just laughing when she took me step by step through how to put the installation CD in, boot off of it, and run checkdisk (which btw, yielded all green, to which she grunted in disappointment - I guess people shut off their computers often enough that they always get red warnings about filesystem problems...) Anyways...
And last but not least, they recently came out with a patch for Quicktime that would effectively freeze your entire UI if you ran certain programs. When contacting AppleCare, they asked me which program did this, and I said "Unrar", "Graphviz" and "Adobe apps", to which his 'straight faced' reply was: we're sorry, Apple can not take responsability for third party software. Which is preposterous because it wasn't the third party software failing so much as the *entire* OS freezing up.
They later reissued a new patch that fixed this problem - but Apple *never* admitted that their initial fix was broken.
All of this is that kind of stuff that would turn into a flame storm for Microsoft.
All that aside, I still like my mbp.