Now I can finally play StarCraft and Civilization3!
Oh, wait a second.
I've actually played through Doom3 and HalfLife2, and so far my list of favorite games remains: StarCraft, Civilization, and (at the time) HalfLife (original). I also sometimes play UT2004.
Is it just me, or is it almost always the case that the games with the best replay value are usually not graphics intensive? If so, then what's the big deal about leading-edge graphics cards?
Yeah, on a pragmatic level, knowledge produced by the scientific method tends to work pretty well.
It's a pretty big leap though for some people to go from: "Science tends to produce warranted, true beliefs" to "science can produce warranted, true beliefs, and nothing else can."
Are you kidding ?, look at the crusades if want evidence of the misery and suffering brought about by christianity.
What's makes you think the Crusades were initiated by true Christians, and more than you think that the Patriot Act, the DMCA, and the Sony Bono copyright extension act were legisted by true patriots / protectors of the Constitution?
Holding a certain office (i.e., senator, bishop, etc.) doesn't guarantee that you belong there, or that you truly believe the ideals that justify the existence of that office to the greater population.
Sorry if I wasn't clear about this earlier in the thread...
I'm not suggesting that extreme skepticism is a useful epistemic standard to apply to day-to-day living.
An earlier poster had stated that religious beliefs are completely undefensible from an epistmological standpoint, whereas scientific beliefs were unassailable.
What I was attempting to demonstrate to that poster was that both bodies of beliefs have their own axioms, including their standards for what observations / reasoning can be counted as "evidence" for a particular view. And so in that regard, there are (sometimes dogmatic) presuppositions involved in deciding that the scientific method is the the most certain way to come to warranted, true belief.
What this was all leading up to is that the people advocating athiestic evolution hold their own dogmas, and that they're therefore incorrect in claiming that only theists / I.D. advocates have beliefs that are contingent on presuppositions. To put crasly, that poster is also being dogmatic, he just hasn't apparently realised it yet.
It doesn't. I agree: a sane/honest individual probably would eventually terminate his attempts to drill down into your tree of explanations. My point was, however, that if we're holding FORMAL provability as the standard by which we accept any cosmological view, scientific justification is subject to serious problems as well - it's not just religion.
I wasn't trying to argue about what's reasonable, but rather that scientific and religious beliefs are both difficult/impossible to back up with correct formal proofs.
But I suggest we consider the word "sane", since you brought it up. You realize that when you say "sane", you're introducing a subjective element about what YOU consider to be reasonable, right?
Here's just a guess: you consider anyone who weighs evidence the way you do sane, and someone who puts weight on things such as the testimony of the Holy Spirit to be INsane.
There's no escaping it now matter how you twist and turn: you have presuppositions about what is a reasonable epistomology. Although ideas like "reasonable" and "sane" are helpful in practical reasonsing, they're both subjective and hard to justify to others.
And those presuppositions affect your capacity to judge the correctness of I.D. and of evolution. I don't understand why you're trying so hard to duck that.
Agreed. And then the conclussions of those tests are debatble, leading to further test. You face an infinite egress.
My point being, both scientific beliefs and religious beliefs are susceptible to being attacked by skeptics.
I will go further and say that God's existence is unprovable and therefore any explanation that involves divine intervention is at its roots unscientific. Science deals with hypotheses that can be falsified. And I will give you a piece of evidence that can falsify evolution: rabbit fossils in the Precambrian. According to evolution they can't be there, and after a century of looking they still aren't.
You're talking about a different level of proof than I was addressing. Suppose I tell you that I found such rabbit fossils. You wouldn't accept this as a counterproof to evolution, because:
You could claim that I got them from somewhere else, and possibly planted them there.
You could suspect that all of the heavy drinking you were doing that day lead you to hear me wrong. After all, it's a pretty silly sounding claim in your mind, so I probably didn't actually say that thing about finding rabbit fossils.
You could claim that what I found was a rabbit-LIKE fossil, but given the general body of evidence that supports evolution, you'll assume for now that we're missing something in our analysis.
That's the kind of wringer that even your prove-evolution-wrong evidence could be wrung through. My point being that practically speaking even scientific claims can't be undeniably falsified - there are ways to plausibly call into question any assault on a scientific theory. That's why I don't think the line that you drew between science and religion is a valid one.
I know a lot of people who hold to a particular religion because it "just works" as well.
One reason to care about the truth of an idea beyond whether it seems to "work" or not, is this: A truly correct belief will also work in the future, whereas a false belief might stop working for you in the future.
So to whatever extent you want to control your quality of life in the future, you're incented to hold beliefs that are genuinely true.
I generally agree, but "proof" is a frustratingly high standard for anything we believe, including scientific conclussions.
Radical skeptics might be unrealistic and sometimes a bit silly, but they make some good points about our ability to "prove" anything perfectly. (I'm including Descartes in that group of skeptics.)
You can say that there's no proof regarding God's existence. You might accept that there is some evidence that points to it, and other evidence that points against it. Sorting through those issues is difficult at best, if you're serious about finding the truth of the matter.
But science has its own articles of faith (or assumption, axium, etc.):
- Things worked in the past as they do now. Thus experiments we perform now are informative to what happened back then.
- We're not just brains in vats, being fed false sensory perceptions.
- Our mental faculties are sufficiently good that proofs we judge to be true are, in fact, true. (I don't know about you, but I've sometimes been persuaded that a position was true, only to later conclude I was wrong.)
The main point here is that "proof" in the formal sense is an astoundingly high standard that pretty much no religious or scientific beliefs can be called "proven".
I don't think I actually am missing your point. I think you're drawing a distinction in degrees: a hypothesis is a belief with little/moderate epistemic warrant, and a theory is a belief with much more epistemic warrant.
What I'm saying is, your belief about the relative degree of supporting evidence is subjective: you have a certain set of rules by which you consider something to be evidence, and some Christians have other rules. Those Christians may have much more evidence than you think they do, because they're using different rules than you are regarding what's to be considered evidence. I'm conjecting that they may have enough evidence for their beliefs to be called "theory" rather than "hypothesis".
When you say ID has no evidence supporting it, I think that's a hard claim to defend. I admit it may have no evidence that you accept, but I think you're saying that no one has sufficient evidence for calling it a theory. If that's what you're saying, then here's why I think you're possibly mistaken:
1. You don't know what observations other people have made. You know that observations that you've directly experienced and the ones you've been told about / read about. But it's a big leap frmo there to thinking that no one else has observed better evidence than you have.
2. I think there are some common experiences that many of us have, that can be interpreted differently regarding what beliefs they support. You see a beautiful sunset and while you think it's nice to look at, I'm going to guess that you think, "How lucky my brain is constructed to feel pleasure right now." Some theists would say, "Wow, God rocks. What a beautiful universe [s]he has made."
Do you agree with me so far that two people can draw different conclussions about the implications of a beautiful sunset? I'm not asking you to agree that the theist's conclussion is correct, just that two different conclussions were drawn.
If so, then what I want to zoom in on here is the question of exactly why you consider your physical reductionistic interpretation to be more valid than the theists. I suspect that when you reflect on it you'll find that in the background you a priori ruled out the theistic explanation.
Where I'm going with this is that no one (or almost no one) builds his beliefs like a proof-tree, with inscrutible axiomatic beliefs at the leaves of the tree. Rather, even things that we'd like to consider raw evidence typically gets assessed in a way that's compatible with beliefs we already hold at the time we're given the new evidence. This is what I meant by "retroduction" in an earlier post.
SO... sorry for the long-winded argument, but here's where I'm going with this: When you say there's no evidence for I.D., consider the possibility that when you're considering an experience / observation, you've got presuppositions that guarantee you couldn't take that observation that supports I.D. *even if I.D. were actually true*.
---
This is important, because what it means is that you're very like a careful-thinking Christian, agnostic, Buddhist, etc. in the following regard: You're "scientific" conclussion regarding evolution might be no more free of metaphysical presuppositions than their conclussions are.
Now, when you say, "ID is not science. It is a naked attempt by certain fundementalist Christians to push their beliefs on everyone." I think you're confusing two (partially overlapping) groups of people:
Group A) They believe I.D. because it makes the most sense given the rest of what they believe about the universe and about God. Your beef with these people is on scientific / logical grounds. You'd probably think some of these people are smart, and some of them are stupid, after talking with them.
Group B) They believe that I.D. should be taught in schools. In some ways they're just like you: They hate for children to be taught beliefs that they consider incorrect and mentally / socially damaging. But some of these people might j
It really does depend on the code
on
A Review of GCC 4.0
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There was one test case I did for my own use. I've got a small C++ program that's computationally heavey and has a small working set of memory.
On that program (on a P4) I got an 11% reduction in runtime using GCC 4 vs. GCC 3.3.5. This was actually a big deal for me work.
The lesson here: You're mileage with GCC 4.0's improvements may vary from the benchmarks, and you might want to try it on your own code.
IIRC, the school boards in Kansas, etc. aren't saying that ID is a fact where as evolution is a theory. Rather, they're presenting both as theories.
It sounds like what the ACLU and perhaps you object to is letting the students weigh the evidence themselves.
BTW, there's an important issue this raises: exactly who gets to decide which observations are qualified as "evidence"?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't consider various evidences for Christianity's truth to be valid evidence for anything, except perhaps as evidence for the idiocy of Christians. So be it.
However, I think you'll find that ultimately your rejection of the validity of such sources of evidence are rather axiomatic. Or, that they don't cohere very well with the web of beliefs you hold. In that light, you might be able to see your own ideas about evidence as being on equally dubious grounds as those of the creationists.
I also suspect you have an unrealistically idealized notion of how the scientific process works. You seem to think that the scientific process is basically an inductive one. If you have the time, Google for "retroduction". I think that's probably a better explanation of how people (including scientists) come to hold or discard certain beliefs, and it's rather at odds with your post.
I've noticed a subtle issue with the I.D. vs. Evolutionists article. The press, and *maybe* the school boards, are saying that teachers are to present evolutions as "just a theory".
The word "just" is badly equivocal in this debate. Does "just a theory" mean:
(A) Evolution is a theory, but is definitely not true, or...
(B) Evolution is a theory, but like all theories that explain observations, is subject to later discovery that the theory is wrong. (I.e., The Underdetermination of Theory by Evidence.)
It's possible that the school boards mean one of {A, B}, but the press / critics are taking the school board to mean the other of {A, B}.
Unfortunately, confusing (A) and (B) is tragic for this debate, because this is partly a debate on epistemic warrant: "What's a good enough reason for a person to believe a particular proposition?"
We might say that the school boards have insufficient warrant for claiming evolution to be false. OTOH, many calm, intelligent people consider the epistemic warrany for macro evolution to be less than a perfectly shut case.
It seems to me that the ACLU isn't merely arguing that the school board shouldn't teach only a Christian world view. Rather, the ACLU is arguing that the school board cannot question the ACLU's world view. And that smacks of both: - religious intollerance (of creationist religious views) AND - of actually imposing religious views on students: the view that creationist religious views are so wrong that they shouldn't be taught on equal footing as The True Belief (evolution).
I've noticed that as people get older (myself included), things that used to be exciting and fun eventually get tedious.
I think it's that eventually you become familiar enough with the art, field, whatever, that whenever a new game, pop song, etc. comes out, you can clearly see that ton of similarities it has with past works.
I've noticed this myself with music, gaming, and programming. Eventually everything seems to me an uninteresting instance of a general case that I know well.
I've heard that MS will give this version free to current licencees of 32-bit XP Pro. Does anyone know when/how we're supposed to get the x86-64 version?
Consider this: If the stories are to be believed, Linux development experienced significant gains in productivity for the several years it was done with BitKeeper. Now we need to move off of BitKeeper.
If we got several years of significantly increased productivity, for the cost of two brief SCCS transitions (one onto BK, the other off from BK), is that such a bad deal?
The U.S. Navy has for a while been working under this new model: focus on short-term-beneficial research rather than the longer-term stuff. (This applies to all Naval research, not just computer science.)
I've spoken with a sponsor in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). He said that that they're starting to realize the weakness of this approach, and expect to ramp-up longer term research investments in the next few years.
Perhaps the same thing will happen with DARPA-funded research in a while.
There's been a rumour that owners (oops... licensees) of XP Pro will get a free upgrade to the 64-bit version.
Anyone know if this will happen?
(I'm keenly interested in this, since I own XP Pro and would like to see my video capture card stop working for lack of an XP-64 driver. Thank goodness for Linux support.)
So perhaps the best way to think of changing requirements is that a new project is being proposed. And there's no reason to assume that a new project has the same timeframe, or can fully capitalize on the past completed work of, the original project.
And a good portion of the younger developers I've dealt with have no clue about marketing or financial pressures on getting a product out that's "good enough".
Don't get me wrong: I'm a developer, not an MBA-type. But I've run across primadonna coders that get so hung up on thinking of their coding as a form of aestheticly-oriented art, that left unchecked they'd bankrupt the company or totally miss the market window for the requested feature.
I also see this in computer science research, which is truly the land of cheap hacking. In truth, a huge fraction of code produced for research is genuinely throw-away. Overly purist coders can cause c.s. research to get done at 1/10 the rate it could otherwise be completed at.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have time for this conversation, but I feel obligated to make this point...
What do you mean by "right" and "wrong"?
Tons hinges on that, including whether or not its a good basis for partially determining punishment levels.
Now I can finally play StarCraft and Civilization3! Oh, wait a second. I've actually played through Doom3 and HalfLife2, and so far my list of favorite games remains: StarCraft, Civilization, and (at the time) HalfLife (original). I also sometimes play UT2004. Is it just me, or is it almost always the case that the games with the best replay value are usually not graphics intensive? If so, then what's the big deal about leading-edge graphics cards?
Yeah, on a pragmatic level, knowledge produced by the scientific method tends to work pretty well.
It's a pretty big leap though for some people to go from:
"Science tends to produce warranted, true beliefs"
to
"science can produce warranted, true beliefs, and nothing else can."
Holding a certain office (i.e., senator, bishop, etc.) doesn't guarantee that you belong there, or that you truly believe the ideals that justify the existence of that office to the greater population.
Example: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521477352/ qid=1115599820/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-2291834 -5858269 >
Sorry if I wasn't clear about this earlier in the thread...
I'm not suggesting that extreme skepticism is a useful epistemic standard to apply to day-to-day living.
An earlier poster had stated that religious beliefs are completely undefensible from an epistmological standpoint, whereas scientific beliefs were unassailable.
What I was attempting to demonstrate to that poster was that both bodies of beliefs have their own axioms, including their standards for what observations / reasoning can be counted as "evidence" for a particular view. And so in that regard, there are (sometimes dogmatic) presuppositions involved in deciding that the scientific method is the the most certain way to come to warranted, true belief.
What this was all leading up to is that the people advocating athiestic evolution hold their own dogmas, and that they're therefore incorrect in claiming that only theists / I.D. advocates have beliefs that are contingent on presuppositions. To put crasly, that poster is also being dogmatic, he just hasn't apparently realised it yet.
It doesn't. I agree: a sane/honest individual probably would eventually terminate his attempts to drill down into your tree of explanations. My point was, however, that if we're holding FORMAL provability as the standard by which we accept any cosmological view, scientific justification is subject to serious problems as well - it's not just religion.
I wasn't trying to argue about what's reasonable, but rather that scientific and religious beliefs are both difficult/impossible to back up with correct formal proofs.
But I suggest we consider the word "sane", since you brought it up. You realize that when you say "sane", you're introducing a subjective element about what YOU consider to be reasonable, right?
Here's just a guess: you consider anyone who weighs evidence the way you do sane, and someone who puts weight on things such as the testimony of the Holy Spirit to be INsane.
There's no escaping it now matter how you twist and turn: you have presuppositions about what is a reasonable epistomology. Although ideas like "reasonable" and "sane" are helpful in practical reasonsing, they're both subjective and hard to justify to others.
And those presuppositions affect your capacity to judge the correctness of I.D. and of evolution. I don't understand why you're trying so hard to duck that.
- You could claim that I got them from somewhere else, and possibly planted them there.
- You could suspect that all of the heavy drinking you were doing that day lead you to hear me wrong. After all, it's a pretty silly sounding claim in your mind, so I probably didn't actually say that thing about finding rabbit fossils.
- You could claim that what I found was a rabbit-LIKE fossil, but given the general body of evidence that supports evolution, you'll assume for now that we're missing something in our analysis.
That's the kind of wringer that even your prove-evolution-wrong evidence could be wrung through. My point being that practically speaking even scientific claims can't be undeniably falsified - there are ways to plausibly call into question any assault on a scientific theory. That's why I don't think the line that you drew between science and religion is a valid one.I know a lot of people who hold to a particular religion because it "just works" as well.
One reason to care about the truth of an idea beyond whether it seems to "work" or not, is this: A truly correct belief will also work in the future, whereas a false belief might stop working for you in the future.
So to whatever extent you want to control your quality of life in the future, you're incented to hold beliefs that are genuinely true.
I generally agree, but "proof" is a frustratingly high standard for anything we believe, including scientific conclussions.
Radical skeptics might be unrealistic and sometimes a bit silly, but they make some good points about our ability to "prove" anything perfectly. (I'm including Descartes in that group of skeptics.)
You can say that there's no proof regarding God's existence. You might accept that there is some evidence that points to it, and other evidence that points against it. Sorting through those issues is difficult at best, if you're serious about finding the truth of the matter.
But science has its own articles of faith (or assumption, axium, etc.):
- Things worked in the past as they do now. Thus experiments we perform now are informative to what happened back then.
- We're not just brains in vats, being fed false sensory perceptions.
- Our mental faculties are sufficiently good that proofs we judge to be true are, in fact, true. (I don't know about you, but I've sometimes been persuaded that a position was true, only to later conclude I was wrong.)
The main point here is that "proof" in the formal sense is an astoundingly high standard that pretty much no religious or scientific beliefs can be called "proven".
I don't think I actually am missing your point. I think you're drawing a distinction in degrees: a hypothesis is a belief with little/moderate epistemic warrant, and a theory is a belief with much more epistemic warrant.
What I'm saying is, your belief about the relative degree of supporting evidence is subjective: you have a certain set of rules by which you consider something to be evidence, and some Christians have other rules. Those Christians may have much more evidence than you think they do, because they're using different rules than you are regarding what's to be considered evidence. I'm conjecting that they may have enough evidence for their beliefs to be called "theory" rather than "hypothesis".
When you say ID has no evidence supporting it, I think that's a hard claim to defend. I admit it may have no evidence that you accept, but I think you're saying that no one has sufficient evidence for calling it a theory. If that's what you're saying, then here's why I think you're possibly mistaken:
1. You don't know what observations other people have made. You know that observations that you've directly experienced and the ones you've been told about / read about. But it's a big leap frmo there to thinking that no one else has observed better evidence than you have.
2. I think there are some common experiences that many of us have, that can be interpreted differently regarding what beliefs they support. You see a beautiful sunset and while you think it's nice to look at, I'm going to guess that you think, "How lucky my brain is constructed to feel pleasure right now." Some theists would say, "Wow, God rocks. What a beautiful universe [s]he has made."
Do you agree with me so far that two people can draw different conclussions about the implications of a beautiful sunset? I'm not asking you to agree that the theist's conclussion is correct, just that two different conclussions were drawn.
If so, then what I want to zoom in on here is the question of exactly why you consider your physical reductionistic interpretation to be more valid than the theists. I suspect that when you reflect on it you'll find that in the background you a priori ruled out the theistic explanation.
Where I'm going with this is that no one (or almost no one) builds his beliefs like a proof-tree, with inscrutible axiomatic beliefs at the leaves of the tree. Rather, even things that we'd like to consider raw evidence typically gets assessed in a way that's compatible with beliefs we already hold at the time we're given the new evidence. This is what I meant by "retroduction" in an earlier post.
SO... sorry for the long-winded argument, but here's where I'm going with this: When you say there's no evidence for I.D., consider the possibility that when you're considering an experience / observation, you've got presuppositions that guarantee you couldn't take that observation that supports I.D. *even if I.D. were actually true*.
---
This is important, because what it means is that you're very like a careful-thinking Christian, agnostic, Buddhist, etc. in the following regard: You're "scientific" conclussion regarding evolution might be no more free of metaphysical presuppositions than their conclussions are.
Now, when you say, "ID is not science. It is a naked attempt by certain fundementalist Christians to push their beliefs on everyone." I think you're confusing two (partially overlapping) groups of people:
Group A) They believe I.D. because it makes the most sense given the rest of what they believe about the universe and about God. Your beef with these people is on scientific / logical grounds. You'd probably think some of these people are smart, and some of them are stupid, after talking with them.
Group B) They believe that I.D. should be taught in schools. In some ways they're just like you: They hate for children to be taught beliefs that they consider incorrect and mentally / socially damaging. But some of these people might j
There was one test case I did for my own use. I've got a small C++ program that's computationally heavey and has a small working set of memory.
On that program (on a P4) I got an 11% reduction in runtime using GCC 4 vs. GCC 3.3.5. This was actually a big deal for me work.
The lesson here: You're mileage with GCC 4.0's improvements may vary from the benchmarks, and you might want to try it on your own code.
IIRC, the school boards in Kansas, etc. aren't saying that ID is a fact where as evolution is a theory. Rather, they're presenting both as theories .
It sounds like what the ACLU and perhaps you object to is letting the students weigh the evidence themselves.
BTW, there's an important issue this raises: exactly who gets to decide which observations are qualified as "evidence"?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you don't consider various evidences for Christianity's truth to be valid evidence for anything, except perhaps as evidence for the idiocy of Christians. So be it.
However, I think you'll find that ultimately your rejection of the validity of such sources of evidence are rather axiomatic. Or, that they don't cohere very well with the web of beliefs you hold. In that light, you might be able to see your own ideas about evidence as being on equally dubious grounds as those of the creationists.
I also suspect you have an unrealistically idealized notion of how the scientific process works. You seem to think that the scientific process is basically an inductive one. If you have the time, Google for "retroduction". I think that's probably a better explanation of how people (including scientists) come to hold or discard certain beliefs, and it's rather at odds with your post.
I've noticed a subtle issue with the I.D. vs. Evolutionists article. The press, and *maybe* the school boards, are saying that teachers are to present evolutions as "just a theory".
The word "just" is badly equivocal in this debate. Does "just a theory" mean:
(A) Evolution is a theory, but is definitely not true, or...
(B) Evolution is a theory, but like all theories that explain observations, is subject to later discovery that the theory is wrong. (I.e., The Underdetermination of Theory by Evidence.)
It's possible that the school boards mean one of {A, B}, but the press / critics are taking the school board to mean the other of {A, B}.
Unfortunately, confusing (A) and (B) is tragic for this debate, because this is partly a debate on epistemic warrant: "What's a good enough reason for a person to believe a particular proposition?"
We might say that the school boards have insufficient warrant for claiming evolution to be false. OTOH, many calm, intelligent people consider the epistemic warrany for macro evolution to be less than a perfectly shut case.
It seems to me that the ACLU isn't merely arguing that the school board shouldn't teach only a Christian world view. Rather, the ACLU is arguing that the school board cannot question the ACLU's world view. And that smacks of both:
- religious intollerance (of creationist religious views) AND
- of actually imposing religious views on students: the view that creationist religious views are so wrong that they shouldn't be taught on equal footing as The True Belief (evolution).
I've noticed that as people get older (myself included), things that used to be exciting and fun eventually get tedious.
I think it's that eventually you become familiar enough with the art, field, whatever, that whenever a new game, pop song, etc. comes out, you can clearly see that ton of similarities it has with past works.
I've noticed this myself with music, gaming, and programming. Eventually everything seems to me an uninteresting instance of a general case that I know well.
I've heard that MS will give this version free to current licencees of 32-bit XP Pro. Does anyone know when/how we're supposed to get the x86-64 version?
If we can slow light to somehow make our "units" twice as long, we'll never get in a war again. Their women won't consider our lives expendable.
Don't forget: The official measure of Tsunami propogation speed is, "the speed of a commercial jetliner".
Consider this: If the stories are to be believed, Linux development experienced significant gains in productivity for the several years it was done with BitKeeper. Now we need to move off of BitKeeper.
If we got several years of significantly increased productivity, for the cost of two brief SCCS transitions (one onto BK, the other off from BK), is that such a bad deal?
A *huge* fraction of U.S. DoD money has been diverted from research to fund the war in Iraq.
It's possible that, once we manage to lose the cowboy mentality, the longer-term research will resume.
Don't underestimate the cost of the war in Iraq on the DoD's normal operations.
The U.S. Navy has for a while been working under this new model: focus on short-term-beneficial research rather than the longer-term stuff. (This applies to all Naval research, not just computer science.)
I've spoken with a sponsor in the Office of Naval Research (ONR). He said that that they're starting to realize the weakness of this approach, and expect to ramp-up longer term research investments in the next few years.
Perhaps the same thing will happen with DARPA-funded research in a while.
There's been a rumour that owners (oops... licensees) of XP Pro will get a free upgrade to the 64-bit version.
Anyone know if this will happen?
(I'm keenly interested in this, since I own XP Pro and would like to see my video capture card stop working for lack of an XP-64 driver. Thank goodness for Linux support.)
So perhaps the best way to think of changing requirements is that a new project is being proposed. And there's no reason to assume that a new project has the same timeframe, or can fully capitalize on the past completed work of, the original project.
This view seems both valid and helpful to me.
And a good portion of the younger developers I've dealt with have no clue about marketing or financial pressures on getting a product out that's "good enough".
Don't get me wrong: I'm a developer, not an MBA-type. But I've run across primadonna coders that get so hung up on thinking of their coding as a form of aestheticly-oriented art, that left unchecked they'd bankrupt the company or totally miss the market window for the requested feature.
I also see this in computer science research, which is truly the land of cheap hacking. In truth, a huge fraction of code produced for research is genuinely throw-away. Overly purist coders can cause c.s. research to get done at 1/10 the rate it could otherwise be completed at.