Most people who say they believe in "intelligent design" really believe in "omnipotent design" (i.e. god made it all). The problem is that no one on this planet is smart enough to differentiate that level of design from something that could happen by pure chance.:-)
* Installing apps
* Guiding the Joe user to a friendly painless installation of the OS itself
* customizing
* configuring
in other words... everything.
OK, as one who just spent two days ressurecting a comatose XP box, all I can say is "hogwash".
On Linux (Fedora Core 3), download an RPM using Firefox; go to the Firefox download window; click on the RPM. A dialog box pops up asking for the root password. Fill in the blank. The RPM is installed. Done.
The installation of Fedora Core 3 was no more painful than the reinstall of XP. In fact, for XP I had to call a toll-free number and say something like 30(!) numbers to an automaton, and receive back 30(!) more numbers just to complete the reinstall. And I had to perform something on the order of 7(!) updates with reboots to complete the process. With Fedora, a single update using the "Red Hat Network" GUI had the system up to date.
What needs customizing or configuring that isn't readily available in the Preferences, System Settings or System Tools menus? Anything not in those place requires a trip to regedit in XP or/etc in Linux. A lot of people who have years of experience with Windows get frustrated when they cannot figure out Linux in an hour. Let me tell you, there are plenty who experience it the other way around!
And with regards to your rant about needing standards, Linux has all of the standards that it needs: the Linux Standards Base, which itself incorporates many additional UNIX standards, along with OpenGL, PostScript, and many others. What Linux does not need is a monoculture. That's what I see is wrong with Microsoft and Apple.
Is everything perfect with Linux? No, certainly not. But your critiques are not those I can agree with.
There are bugs that affects applications to a level the user notices, and there are bugs that affect the maintainability of the code, the reusability of the code, and the ease of use of the code. Most bugs are hidden from the user's view.
Does a stack overflow in a piece of code that only occurs when a craftily created exploit is executed constitute a bug? Yes it does -- even when no exploit exists. Under normal operations it does not affect the use of the system -- at least not until an exploit is developed and widely used. The fact that Windows, especially the older versions of the OS, were vulnerable to so many simple exploits illustrates the bugginess of the code. And most of the bugs are not even in close enough to the surface to be so readily exploited.
Does an end user see API bugs? Does anyone outside of Microsoft experience architectural flaws in the Windows OS? No, but that does not mean they do not exist.
What about code that misbehaves when presented with certain data. That may not be a problem for the original application that the code was written for, but any time that code gets reused, the programmer must know about these "hidden features" (read: bugs). Again, the user never sees this sort of bug.
The number they came up with wasn't pulled out their ass. See this article on measuring bugs for a more detailed discussion on the topic.
When reading it, bear in mind that most commercial software is produced for in-house use, receives very little QC, and frequently does not even compile cleanly. It's usuall just "good enough" to get the job done.
Somehow the religious right has managed to frame their religious arguments as "moral" arguments, as if to say that an argument against their position is immoral. And I see so many people on both sides of the debate subconciously buying into that.
I think what you meant to say (sans caps) is "GW wants a constitutional amendment based on religious interpretation." That to me seems like a more apt description of the position in question. There are moral arguments on both sides of the stem cell and gay marriage debates, but those have been lost in the debate.
Stem cell was a code word for abortion in this presidential race. And Americans have moved on from denying rights based on gender and skin color to denying rights based on sexual orientation.
Why is their selfishness so out of control that they have to take questions and reply with their political hate?
Hmm... maybe I really missed something while skimming the article, but the tone I got was disappointment, not hate. These people seemed to really care about the direction that the US is going. Do we now equate criticism with hate in this country? I think that mentality scares me more about the right-wingers than anything else about them.
Parents will scold their children when they misbehave, but that does not mean that they hate them. They scold them because they love them and they care how they develop. America is still a young country, and it does still do stupid shit -- and will under any party. But we should never let our country get to the point that the citizens cannot condemn the actions of our govenment when it does do something wrong. We citizens are still the stewards of our government.
And give the rest of us with no party affiliation a reason to vote! Actually, this year I am in the ABB camp, so Kerry/Edwards gets my vote. But last election cycle, even with the Nader votes, Gore would have lost my state.
The two-party system sucks. I'm not a lesser-of-two-evils type of guy. I don't see either party looking to shore up the public domain, protect my liberty, or move this nation forward. Both candidates are more interested in advancing their own parties than in doing what's right for the U.S.A.
How about we drop the per-state Senate and make it a national body with proportional representation? In my state (CO), we have a ballot measure, the Colorado Electoral College Reform Initiative, up for a vote to make the electoral college vote based on proportional representation. I'm all for that.
+5 Insightful, since it had to be said. I can't believe so many people don't grok this simple concept. Maybe it's because all they subject themselves to is commercial propoganda.
At least you have a corner to cry in. The cost for such insanely high bandwidth is having the population density of Tokyo. There they have to rent a corner to cry in when they need it.
This post ignores the parents assertions about surface density vs. linear density, which is exactly correct. Unless one has fourty+ read heads reading in parallel, the read speed does not scale with surface (planar) density. Each track will have 40x the linear density of CD, and there will be 40x as many tracks to read.
Note that even at 1GB/s, it will still take 10 times as long to read the 1TB disk as it does a CD at 48x.
If the parents post was true, we'd be reading our 250GB disks at ludicrous speed (or 1GB/s) based on simple extrapolation from the read speed of an ancient 4200RPM, 2GB Western Digital HD I have.
The USB key is just handy and easy to take anywhere. It's the sneakernet of our day.
The MMC cards can be read by my Palm, used in my camera, and the small USB reader plugs into everything else. Lots of small, easy to carry storage. Hard part is keeping track of all the small MMC cards.
The Archos is a multi-function unit that does the heavy lifting, yet is still quite portable. (Yeah, the Apple zealots are all screaming iPod!, but I like my hackable Archos FM Recorder. The RockBox firmware is great.)
I attended a talk on Design Patterns by John Vlissides at OOPSLA a few years back and many of the problems he presented in his examples just don't occur in Python (or are trivial to solve). His talk reminded me more why I don't like to program in C++ and Java. I couldn't fathom running into the issues he was using in his examples with a dynamic language like Python. I asked him about this after the talk, but it did not go very far due to his lack of experience with dynamic languages in general (surprising) and Python in particular. And I was new to patterns and was likely not communicating my questions as clearly as one could.
I recently ran by a paper by Alex Martelli called Five Easy Pieces: Simple Python Non-Patterns" that goes into more detail on this topic. In it he says, "Python has a knack for making many issues simpler. This, in turn, enables use of simpler conceptual tools, such as an idiom in lieu of a Design Pattern."
The US is losing the war on communism with Wal-Mart leading the charge!
I would have a lot more respect for your post had it not ended with this line. Capitalists are "winning" the war on communism, at the expense of the US. As an American first, and a capitalist second, I worry about the implications. The problem is that most Americans have been so indoctrinated with "Capitalism is Americanism" that they cannot see the implications. What they fail to see is that capitalists can call any profitable country "home".
Have you every considered that that company may be internally in chaos? Predicting financial markets when they can't even deliver relevant spam-free search results anymore?
Reminds me of economics. Predict the way people will behave and, because it is no longer profitable to behave in that manner, they change their behavior.
About the only things that you can say with certainty about economics is that a) most people try to maximize profits, and b) observing how people behave changes behavior when that observation affects profits.
There is only one premise on what has to happen. Add ethics to basic economic fundamentals
Laudible. But how? Those that behave unethically are currently rewarded in by our system. The way we attempt to deal with that is to enact laws that define ethical behavior. (I won't go into lax enforcement issues.) But the unethical have no bounds. There are always loopholes in which one can exploit unethical behavior at the cost of the ethical.
I beg to differ. The Concord's landings may not be any louder than a regular commercial jet. I don't recall it being particularly loud. But take-off is another thing altogether.
My company's UK office is very close to the flight paths into and out of Heathrow. Work comes to a stop when the Concord flies anywhere near on take off. No one notices the other commercial jets. I didn't notice it until last summer. Most of my time in the UK office was spent while those beasties were grounded. It was quite noticible when they were allowed back in the air.
Quite often, I get a bit of flak from management for being too friendly with the QA people. They usually have this silly "clean-room" concept for how it should be done.
Your management has their hearts in the right place. The problem with the developer providing the QC of their own code is that they may miss the same problems in their test code as they did in development.
I think of the system testing at my company as comprised of two main activities: integration testing and feature testing. I can write unit tests for the last one, but if I misinterpret a requirement, my tests will validate that misinterpretation.
Itegration testing of enterprise applications is more difficult to do by the developer, because usually the development environment does not exactly mimic the production environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Could you imagine being the first scientist to have to discipline your A.I. for trolling on Slashdot?
Most people who say they believe in "intelligent design" really believe in "omnipotent design" (i.e. god made it all). The problem is that no one on this planet is smart enough to differentiate that level of design from something that could happen by pure chance. :-)
* Installing apps
* Guiding the Joe user to a friendly painless installation of the OS itself
* customizing
* configuring
in other words... everything.
OK, as one who just spent two days ressurecting a comatose XP box, all I can say is "hogwash".
On Linux (Fedora Core 3), download an RPM using Firefox; go to the Firefox download window; click on the RPM. A dialog box pops up asking for the root password. Fill in the blank. The RPM is installed. Done.
The installation of Fedora Core 3 was no more painful than the reinstall of XP. In fact, for XP I had to call a toll-free number and say something like 30(!) numbers to an automaton, and receive back 30(!) more numbers just to complete the reinstall. And I had to perform something on the order of 7(!) updates with reboots to complete the process. With Fedora, a single update using the "Red Hat Network" GUI had the system up to date.
What needs customizing or configuring that isn't readily available in the Preferences, System Settings or System Tools menus? Anything not in those place requires a trip to regedit in XP or /etc in Linux. A lot of people who have years of experience with Windows get frustrated when they cannot figure out Linux in an hour. Let me tell you, there are plenty who experience it the other way around!
And with regards to your rant about needing standards, Linux has all of the standards that it needs: the Linux Standards Base, which itself incorporates many additional UNIX standards, along with OpenGL, PostScript, and many others. What Linux does not need is a monoculture. That's what I see is wrong with Microsoft and Apple.
Is everything perfect with Linux? No, certainly not. But your critiques are not those I can agree with.
It's not.
There are bugs that affects applications to a level the user notices, and there are bugs that affect the maintainability of the code, the reusability of the code, and the ease of use of the code. Most bugs are hidden from the user's view.
Does a stack overflow in a piece of code that only occurs when a craftily created exploit is executed constitute a bug? Yes it does -- even when no exploit exists. Under normal operations it does not affect the use of the system -- at least not until an exploit is developed and widely used. The fact that Windows, especially the older versions of the OS, were vulnerable to so many simple exploits illustrates the bugginess of the code. And most of the bugs are not even in close enough to the surface to be so readily exploited.
Does an end user see API bugs? Does anyone outside of Microsoft experience architectural flaws in the Windows OS? No, but that does not mean they do not exist.
What about code that misbehaves when presented with certain data. That may not be a problem for the original application that the code was written for, but any time that code gets reused, the programmer must know about these "hidden features" (read: bugs). Again, the user never sees this sort of bug.
The number they came up with wasn't pulled out their ass. See this article on measuring bugs for a more detailed discussion on the topic.
When reading it, bear in mind that most commercial software is produced for in-house use, receives very little QC, and frequently does not even compile cleanly. It's usuall just "good enough" to get the job done.
Liebchen
Come on, Wil. In Hollywood, even you can have a goatee. Michael Dorn wasn't born looking like a Klingon.
Or was he???
Hmm...
I think what you meant to say (sans caps) is "GW wants a constitutional amendment based on religious interpretation." That to me seems like a more apt description of the position in question. There are moral arguments on both sides of the stem cell and gay marriage debates, but those have been lost in the debate.
Stem cell was a code word for abortion in this presidential race. And Americans have moved on from denying rights based on gender and skin color to denying rights based on sexual orientation.
Such is the way of national progress.
You misspelled "Porsches".
Oprah's gravity well cannot sgnificantly alter the course of this star.
Hmm... maybe I really missed something while skimming the article, but the tone I got was disappointment, not hate. These people seemed to really care about the direction that the US is going. Do we now equate criticism with hate in this country? I think that mentality scares me more about the right-wingers than anything else about them.
Parents will scold their children when they misbehave, but that does not mean that they hate them. They scold them because they love them and they care how they develop. America is still a young country, and it does still do stupid shit -- and will under any party. But we should never let our country get to the point that the citizens cannot condemn the actions of our govenment when it does do something wrong. We citizens are still the stewards of our government.
And give the rest of us with no party affiliation a reason to vote! Actually, this year I am in the ABB camp, so Kerry/Edwards gets my vote. But last election cycle, even with the Nader votes, Gore would have lost my state.
The two-party system sucks. I'm not a lesser-of-two-evils type of guy. I don't see either party looking to shore up the public domain, protect my liberty, or move this nation forward. Both candidates are more interested in advancing their own parties than in doing what's right for the U.S.A.
How about we drop the per-state Senate and make it a national body with proportional representation? In my state (CO), we have a ballot measure, the Colorado Electoral College Reform Initiative, up for a vote to make the electoral college vote based on proportional representation. I'm all for that.
+5 Insightful, since it had to be said. I can't believe so many people don't grok this simple concept. Maybe it's because all they subject themselves to is commercial propoganda.
At least you have a corner to cry in. The cost for such insanely high bandwidth is having the population density of Tokyo. There they have to rent a corner to cry in when they need it.
Come on, Mods. This is not informative!
This post ignores the parents assertions about surface density vs. linear density, which is exactly correct. Unless one has fourty+ read heads reading in parallel, the read speed does not scale with surface (planar) density. Each track will have 40x the linear density of CD, and there will be 40x as many tracks to read.
Note that even at 1GB/s, it will still take 10 times as long to read the 1TB disk as it does a CD at 48x.
If the parents post was true, we'd be reading our 250GB disks at ludicrous speed (or 1GB/s) based on simple extrapolation from the read speed of an ancient 4200RPM, 2GB Western Digital HD I have.
128MB USB key
MMC Reader and multiple MMC cards
20GB Archos MP3 player / hard disk
The USB key is just handy and easy to take anywhere. It's the sneakernet of our day.
The MMC cards can be read by my Palm, used in my camera, and the small USB reader plugs into everything else. Lots of small, easy to carry storage. Hard part is keeping track of all the small MMC cards.
The Archos is a multi-function unit that does the heavy lifting, yet is still quite portable. (Yeah, the Apple zealots are all screaming iPod!, but I like my hackable Archos FM Recorder. The RockBox firmware is great.)
I recently ran by a paper by Alex Martelli called Five Easy Pieces: Simple Python Non-Patterns" that goes into more detail on this topic. In it he says, "Python has a knack for making many issues simpler. This, in turn, enables use of simpler conceptual tools, such as an idiom in lieu of a Design Pattern."
I'm sure the same likely holds true for Lisp.
Yeah, except your program will run. The OP's won't.
Where it means what? NASA management, congressional mismanagement and under-funding, "space", flying through the atmosphere at 17kmph?
I would have a lot more respect for your post had it not ended with this line. Capitalists are "winning" the war on communism, at the expense of the US. As an American first, and a capitalist second, I worry about the implications. The problem is that most Americans have been so indoctrinated with "Capitalism is Americanism" that they cannot see the implications. What they fail to see is that capitalists can call any profitable country "home".
Reminds me of economics. Predict the way people will behave and, because it is no longer profitable to behave in that manner, they change their behavior.
About the only things that you can say with certainty about economics is that a) most people try to maximize profits, and b) observing how people behave changes behavior when that observation affects profits.
Laudible. But how? Those that behave unethically are currently rewarded in by our system. The way we attempt to deal with that is to enact laws that define ethical behavior. (I won't go into lax enforcement issues.) But the unethical have no bounds. There are always loopholes in which one can exploit unethical behavior at the cost of the ethical.
Sure it is. They just moved the decimal two places over to the right. :-)
But to be serious, for examples of how this works in practice, see the current price of dollars in yen. You'll note the use of a decimal.
Dude, you forgot to factor in the cost of the dual 20" LCD panel display into your price. Add $2000.
My company's UK office is very close to the flight paths into and out of Heathrow. Work comes to a stop when the Concord flies anywhere near on take off. No one notices the other commercial jets. I didn't notice it until last summer. Most of my time in the UK office was spent while those beasties were grounded. It was quite noticible when they were allowed back in the air.
Your management has their hearts in the right place. The problem with the developer providing the QC of their own code is that they may miss the same problems in their test code as they did in development.
I think of the system testing at my company as comprised of two main activities: integration testing and feature testing. I can write unit tests for the last one, but if I misinterpret a requirement, my tests will validate that misinterpretation.
Itegration testing of enterprise applications is more difficult to do by the developer, because usually the development environment does not exactly mimic the production environment.