...you would have long ago dropped the idea of expressing your political views as somebody else's pre-packaged "ism" in preferance to buying one or more congress-critters to do your bidding for you.
The EU will go for decimal (metric), the US will go for binary (pocket caclulator lobbyists), the rest of the world will put/omit a (US) behind quoted figures to inform/confuse the reader.
It's far from perfect, but it's better than a recurively expanding unit of information gobbling up the universe.
"due to poor implementation of existing standards and very lazy software developers"
Tip of the day: Source code is like shit, everyone else's stinks.
After two decades as a software developer (plus another as an amature) I can tell you that 99% of the time both your design and implementation will be constrained by an existing code base. The whole thing is recursive: if your "bleeding edge" project becomes "leading edge", it will end up as a legacy system that will in it's turn crush the ambition of a new generation of energetic developers. Sure, some "hacks" are ignorance/lazyness, but I find most to be a reasonable compromise between price/quality/performance at the time of writing.
IMHO: Mapping ASCII onto unicode was (at the time) a good compromise, ditto for the majority of serious Y2K problems. If unicode had not accomodated ASCII then a different standard would have been adopted by the industry - in other words the designers of unicode had no option but to support a range of popular 8bit character pages. If you look back into the history of unicode you will find there were plenty of competing standards, they all promised "transparent" support for popular (extended) ASCII code pages (eg: The code pages found in the back of DOS manuals).
Disclaimer: I was responsible for Y2K compliance for a $100M-5yr project. Fixing the code was trivial - 80+% of the budget was spent on testing for bugs, retesting fixes for bugs, and of course endless meetings explaining calanders and timespan calculations to various groups of PHB's.
It seems the metric LoC = 10TB. If that is so then an LoC is no longer based on a physical library but has rather been redefined based on a more basic unit of information, (ie: the byte). This sort of thing has happened before, the standard time unit (second) is no longer based on the earth's rotation, rather it is based on some esoteric (but very stable) feature of cesium atoms.
IMHO: This is a GoodThing(TM), it could mean the LoC is well on it's way to becoming an accepted SI unit.:)
I belive the list is indeed political and intended to drag in as many people as possible. There is no distinction between rape and pissing on a tree, IMHO the real aim of the list is to make the term "sex offender" meaningless.
If you doubt this then remember the guy who "farthered" the legislation was caught soliciting congressional page boys.
No offence, I find it odd your first reply started with "you think so? How many animals are really studied do you think?", yet you seem to be in complete agreement with everything that is actually in both of Otter's posts?
BTW: I think you need to add rabbits, pigs, sheep, cows, horses, goats and humans to your list.
Yes I heard that on the news a couple of days ago, personally I think it's bullshit since it's not hard to work out that blocking RF is a standard SS practice for Bush & co's motorcades.
It's also interesting to note the fact that people in certain city blocks will be subject to RANDOM BODY searches doesn't engender outrage from our mass media.
Canberra is our capital and the meeting should have been held there. That way even if the terrorists drop a nuke on the city nobody will really care.
"I've always been curious about why it [BASIC] generates such ire"
As some one who also taught himself applesoft BASIC (but did go into computer science) I think it was a great way to start. The reason BASIC was/is so reviled by developers is because the language itself encorages programmers to write spaggetti code (from what I remeber applesoft BASIC did not even have a GOSUB), it teaches you "bad habits" that can be carried over into structured languages.
I don't know about you, but I found once an applesoft BASIC program got to about 2000 lines it was an unreadable mess, especially if you stopped working on it for a while. It's much easier to write readable code with modern versions of BASCIC (such as VB), but the language has been extended so far it looks nothing like what you typed into your IIe.
After a couple of decades in C/C++ development, I sometimes open an unfamiliar source file only to find the comments inside claim that I wrote it. If you could look at some of your files from the 80's, it would be crystal clear what was wrong with applesoft BASIC.
You need the copper for DSL, but I hate the fact that I have to pay for a landline phone. I recently moved from a house to a unit in Melbourne, at the house I had TV and web access via cable, but neither Optus or Telstra will connect cable to a unit.
At least one time I did. In primary school during the 60's we had a drill but when we got outside we could see the most awsome mushroom cloud I have ever witnesses rising perhaps 30,000 feet into a still blue sky. We all got a bit excited mainly due to the duck and cover craze that was also prevelent in Australia at the time. When the principle got up to speak he had everyones undivided attention. Tuned out to be a large grass fire a few miles away and they were sending us home as a precaution, but for a few minutes the whole school thought the "commies" had tried to nuke Melbourne but were off target.
The odd thing was that the cloud was so large even from a distance but I remember thinking it looked almost harmless, it looked a bit like gigantic cotton wool balls.
My first computer was an apple II, someone said you could make money from them so I bought a brand new fangled XT and got a degree as a mature age student. I don't classify myself as a mathematician even though I majored in operations research, and gone are the days when you could read byte code for a faster divide operation in a magazine. Nowadays I find it best to accept some algorithims as "magic spells" with known flaws and side-effects, I know they made sense when I studied them but that was a long time ago.
My point was WP used the word in the correct context, the frustration of looking it up helped you learn something (or at least remember what you had forgotten).
"1) it would not be a cult because they are so massively large and pervasive. maybe the article could have said 'fanboys' or something."
I agree with this, but I suggest term "congress" rather than "fanboys".
Disclaimer: I have made a good living from software development for a couple of decades, in general developers don't get to pick the customers operating system. In fact usually the customers operating system(s) determine the choice of developer(s).
"wonder if the origin of the big bang could be pinpointed."
The "big bang" is still happening and we observe it as the expansion of the visable universe. You are "inside" the "pinpoint" and can never know anything about the "outside", therfore the "origin" is "everywhere". However, run time backwards and the "origin" of the big bang will always turn out to be where you were standing when you made the mesurements. (Liberal use of quotes because language does not accurately convey the strangeness of it all)
"The concern you state about Bangladesh assumes the water rises fast."
Do the words "forced mass migration" mean nothing to you?
BTW: A few degrees change per century is a "rapid change" as far as ecosystems/agriculture are concerned. The distance between civilization and anarchy is three days without food.
ISS and men on Mars is more about engineering and politics than its is about science and exploration. NASA's "Great Observatories" set out to map the universe over the EM spectrum have been a great success. The inward looking projects such as LANDSAT are in the same category. Sadly autonomous exploration is alway the first to go when the budget is cut or a poltician has a "vision" that needs funding.
"Right now, I want a real probe to go to Titan."
We had one not long ago, it's autonomous mothership is also a probe that has still got a few flyby's left in it's mapping mission. What I would like to see is a probe go fishing in Europa's ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
"if you're now old and wealthy enough..."
...you would have long ago dropped the idea of expressing your political views as somebody else's pre-packaged "ism" in preferance to buying one or more congress-critters to do your bidding for you.
"Who bothers to sell essays and dissertations when half the spam I get offers me a PhD outright for $200!"
Phd, pffft - I have the Nigerian finance minister transfering $34M dollars into my account as we speak!
"Just deal with it. XXXXbytes are not SI units, and never will be."
I was aiming for humour but somehow got modded interesting.
The EU will go for decimal (metric), the US will go for binary (pocket caclulator lobbyists), the rest of the world will put/omit a (US) behind quoted figures to inform/confuse the reader.
It's far from perfect, but it's better than a recurively expanding unit of information gobbling up the universe.
"due to poor implementation of existing standards and very lazy software developers"
Tip of the day: Source code is like shit, everyone else's stinks.
After two decades as a software developer (plus another as an amature) I can tell you that 99% of the time both your design and implementation will be constrained by an existing code base. The whole thing is recursive: if your "bleeding edge" project becomes "leading edge", it will end up as a legacy system that will in it's turn crush the ambition of a new generation of energetic developers. Sure, some "hacks" are ignorance/lazyness, but I find most to be a reasonable compromise between price/quality/performance at the time of writing.
IMHO: Mapping ASCII onto unicode was (at the time) a good compromise, ditto for the majority of serious Y2K problems. If unicode had not accomodated ASCII then a different standard would have been adopted by the industry - in other words the designers of unicode had no option but to support a range of popular 8bit character pages. If you look back into the history of unicode you will find there were plenty of competing standards, they all promised "transparent" support for popular (extended) ASCII code pages (eg: The code pages found in the back of DOS manuals).
Disclaimer: I was responsible for Y2K compliance for a $100M-5yr project. Fixing the code was trivial - 80+% of the budget was spent on testing for bugs, retesting fixes for bugs, and of course endless meetings explaining calanders and timespan calculations to various groups of PHB's.
It seems the metric LoC = 10TB. If that is so then an LoC is no longer based on a physical library but has rather been redefined based on a more basic unit of information, (ie: the byte). This sort of thing has happened before, the standard time unit (second) is no longer based on the earth's rotation, rather it is based on some esoteric (but very stable) feature of cesium atoms.
:)
IMHO: This is a GoodThing(TM), it could mean the LoC is well on it's way to becoming an accepted SI unit.
"one of the world's biggest humanitary problems"
I agree that in many countries brothels are a problem for those who work/slave in them.
"Want proof?"
Ever been to Amsterdam? Even here in Australia where brothels are also legal there are plenty of people who WANT to work there.
"political success"
I belive the list is indeed political and intended to drag in as many people as possible. There is no distinction between rape and pissing on a tree, IMHO the real aim of the list is to make the term "sex offender" meaningless.
If you doubt this then remember the guy who "farthered" the legislation was caught soliciting congressional page boys.
"Scientists believe in whatever the current version of 'science' is and act in pursuit of grant funding."
Just a note to save any further embarassment for you: Your post is displaying your ignorance in an embarrasing fashion.
OTOH: You are obviously not a scientist so I suppose you can be forgiven for not knowing the definition of science or how it is funded.
No offence, I find it odd your first reply started with "you think so? How many animals are really studied do you think?", yet you seem to be in complete agreement with everything that is actually in both of Otter's posts?
BTW: I think you need to add rabbits, pigs, sheep, cows, horses, goats and humans to your list.
Yes I heard that on the news a couple of days ago, personally I think it's bullshit since it's not hard to work out that blocking RF is a standard SS practice for Bush & co's motorcades.
It's also interesting to note the fact that people in certain city blocks will be subject to RANDOM BODY searches doesn't engender outrage from our mass media.
Canberra is our capital and the meeting should have been held there. That way even if the terrorists drop a nuke on the city nobody will really care.
"I'm not saying their arguments don't hold merit, but there is certainly a counter-argument to these claims."
So where is the counter-argument that hasn't already been debunked?
Einstien's philosophical argument (that he pinched from someone else) was: "Man cannot will what he wills".
Sorry about the buggy HTML italics, I should stick to C/C++. :)
"I've always been curious about why it [BASIC] generates such ire"
As some one who also taught himself applesoft BASIC (but did go into computer science) I think it was a great way to start. The reason BASIC was/is so reviled by developers is because the language itself encorages programmers to write spaggetti code (from what I remeber applesoft BASIC did not even have a GOSUB), it teaches you "bad habits" that can be carried over into structured languages.
I don't know about you, but I found once an applesoft BASIC program got to about 2000 lines it was an unreadable mess, especially if you stopped working on it for a while. It's much easier to write readable code with modern versions of BASCIC (such as VB), but the language has been extended so far it looks nothing like what you typed into your IIe.
After a couple of decades in C/C++ development, I sometimes open an unfamiliar source file only to find the comments inside claim that I wrote it. If you could look at some of your files from the 80's, it would be crystal clear what was wrong with applesoft BASIC.
You need the copper for DSL, but I hate the fact that I have to pay for a landline phone. I recently moved from a house to a unit in Melbourne, at the house I had TV and web access via cable, but neither Optus or Telstra will connect cable to a unit.
"So, essentially, you are saying that slashdot posts are like schematic drawings in braindead software [snip]"
A perfectly valid slashdot analogy, one of the braindead features is that the speeel checking comes after you hit "post".
"Did you take fire drills serious at school?"
At least one time I did. In primary school during the 60's we had a drill but when we got outside we could see the most awsome mushroom cloud I have ever witnesses rising perhaps 30,000 feet into a still blue sky. We all got a bit excited mainly due to the duck and cover craze that was also prevelent in Australia at the time. When the principle got up to speak he had everyones undivided attention. Tuned out to be a large grass fire a few miles away and they were sending us home as a precaution, but for a few minutes the whole school thought the "commies" had tried to nuke Melbourne but were off target.
The odd thing was that the cloud was so large even from a distance but I remember thinking it looked almost harmless, it looked a bit like gigantic cotton wool balls.
My first computer was an apple II, someone said you could make money from them so I bought a brand new fangled XT and got a degree as a mature age student. I don't classify myself as a mathematician even though I majored in operations research, and gone are the days when you could read byte code for a faster divide operation in a magazine. Nowadays I find it best to accept some algorithims as "magic spells" with known flaws and side-effects, I know they made sense when I studied them but that was a long time ago.
My point was WP used the word in the correct context, the frustration of looking it up helped you learn something (or at least remember what you had forgotten).
"they refer to the need for the seed to be "irreducible."" (my emph.)
:)
I read your post as an anecdote of how you used WP to extend your computer science vocabulary beyond the specialist use of the word "seed".
"1) it would not be a cult because they are so massively large and pervasive. maybe the article could have said 'fanboys' or something."
I agree with this, but I suggest term "congress" rather than "fanboys".
Disclaimer: I have made a good living from software development for a couple of decades, in general developers don't get to pick the customers operating system. In fact usually the customers operating system(s) determine the choice of developer(s).
"wonder if the origin of the big bang could be pinpointed."
The "big bang" is still happening and we observe it as the expansion of the visable universe. You are "inside" the "pinpoint" and can never know anything about the "outside", therfore the "origin" is "everywhere". However, run time backwards and the "origin" of the big bang will always turn out to be where you were standing when you made the mesurements. (Liberal use of quotes because language does not accurately convey the strangeness of it all)
"The concern you state about Bangladesh assumes the water rises fast."
Do the words "forced mass migration" mean nothing to you?
BTW: A few degrees change per century is a "rapid change" as far as ecosystems/agriculture are concerned. The distance between civilization and anarchy is three days without food.
"I realize it's traditional for people defending global warming to do so without actual data"
Debunk this fucktard.
"You guys need a history lesson."
Since I grew up in the 60's and actually remeber the global cooling thing it's much more likely that you suffer from poor comprehension skills.
"Mount Saint Helens released more CO2 than humanity has in its entire existence"
Oh please, very few people here are that stupid. I can only assume that either you are an exception, or you are deliberately trolling.
ISS and men on Mars is more about engineering and politics than its is about science and exploration. NASA's "Great Observatories" set out to map the universe over the EM spectrum have been a great success. The inward looking projects such as LANDSAT are in the same category. Sadly autonomous exploration is alway the first to go when the budget is cut or a poltician has a "vision" that needs funding.
"Right now, I want a real probe to go to Titan."
We had one not long ago, it's autonomous mothership is also a probe that has still got a few flyby's left in it's mapping mission. What I would like to see is a probe go fishing in Europa's ocean.