There are even more subtle examples. I'm not sure if it's still there, but one of the examples from the old Mac HIGs was the owl. In most European cultures, it is associated with wisdom, so it makes a good icon for a help system. This, however, is not universal and in some places owls are associated with the occult and with evil. People in these locales generally won't expect to click on an owl when they want help, unless it's to curse the idiot who designed the UI that is confusing them.
It's actually more complicated than that. JavaScript is not an implementation of ECMAScript, it is a dialect of ECMAScript. There are JavaScript specifications published independently of ECMA. After a new ECMAScript release, the new features usually contain some things that were already in JavaScript, and the next JavaScript specification usually includes the things that were introduced in ECMAScript.
The third explanation in this thread, and not the correct one either.
Originally, Hungarian notation was used by the Apps group in Microsoft. It was used to indicate things that were not expressed in the C type system. For example, an integer referring to a column number in a spreadsheet would be colsFoo, while another referring to a row would be rowsFoo. If you wrote something like if (rowCurrent
When the Systems group adopted the convention, they started using it for the variable type, not its meaning. This completely defeated the point, but the Systems group version was the one that caught on due to their greater influence within the company.
C is one of the few Algol-family languages where this is actually necessary. In most others, you can create a columns type and a rows type that are both integers but can not be implicitly cast to the other.
is that an API does not break "unwritten" conventions like always returning true even when the operation was unsuccessful
Most POSIX APIs return true on error and false on failure. The idea is that this lets you write if (something()) { error_handler(); }. I've no idea why they thought this made more sense than if (!something()), but judging by the rest of UNIX I suspect that they had to type their code in morse with one hand while fighting a tiger with the other, so every character saved could mean the difference between life and death...
Nope. Aeroplanes may be regarded as the territory of the nation where they are registered (but often aren't when on the ground). Airports are regarded as the parts of the country containing them, with the occasional exemption for border control (for example, Schiphol airport has the schengen line running right down the middle of it) to make life easier for customs and border control, but even on the 'other country' side of the lines the local laws still apply.
So you spin off a wholly owned subsidiary to do the management. AT&T leases them the buildings for $10bn a year. If they make less from them than that, then it's a tax write-off. If they make more than that, AT&T gets a dividend.
Not really, because they're quite geographically diverse. $100bn sounds a lot, buy then that's only $2bn per state. Given the cost of office space in city centres, that can be as little as one floor of an office building in each major population centre in the USA. Finding someone who wants to buy it all is likely to be impossible, but finding people who want each bit should be quite easy. On the other hand, finding someone willing to pay 15% of the sale price per annum is also probably quite easy, so it's a bit surprising that they want to sell it - $15bn / year in the profit column would probably look quite good on the balance sheet and would mean that they could easily reclaim some of it if they needed more space in the future. Unfortunately, execs get bigger bonuses if they sell off assets that aren't needed right now...
That is, unless your developers belong behind a McDonald's counter in the first place.
Which is often the case for web developers or, at least, the people who hire web developers. To an even greater degree than most of the rest of the industry, they are judged by UI first, scalability and performance second, and security a very distant third.
Why scan them all? I bet you only need about a 10% of them actually scanned the rest you simply have to store in case they might be needed.
Working out which ones are in that 10% is a lot easier once they are scanned and searchable. And, by the time they're scanned, there isn't much of an advantage in deleting them...
His point about Muslims is irrelevant, because the original point is that the Christians crusades are an example of people doing bad things in the name of religion. The fact that Muslims also did bad things in the name of religion is not a counter argument.
If the Christian who believes in God and tries to live a moral life acting in kindness towards his neighbours is wrong, when he dies he finds he goes nowhere after death but has lived a good moral life while here on earth.
And if he's spent a large proportion of his life trying to convert people? Or if he's lived a less moral life due to his religion, for example by participating in a holy war, or by helping spread AIDS by preaching against the use of condoms in Africa?
If the atheist is wrong, though he may have lived a moral life, he will still have to stand before God and explain his unbelief.
And this belief is entirely possible to justify rationally. If God does exist and is not capable of being swayed by rational argument, then you're fucked anyway. If God doesn't exist, then it doesn't matter. If God does exist and is rational, then he will accept that atheism is a rational position.
You act as if the only two choices Christianity and atheism. This is the flaw in Pascal's wager. There are at more than two religions that say that you will go to some form of hell if you don't belong to them. Each one has exactly the same amount of verifiable evidence for them (i.e. none). If one is true and you believe the wrong one, you go to hell. If one is true and you don't believe either, you still go to hell. You maybe gain slightly on the odds, but some religions (including the abrahamic religions) regard worshiping a false god as being worse than worshiping no god, so even that's a bit of a stretch.
If a Christian dies and discovers that the Valkyries come to take dead people off to feast with Odin, do you really think that the fact that he believed in an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity will be something the Valkyrie will care about?
As for proof... look around at nature. Can you honestly believe it was all an accident? A random chance due to some atoms rattling around until they got in the right order?
The only kind of person who can't believe this is someone who has absolutely no concept of how big the universe is and how long it took. It took billions of years for life to form on this planet. This galaxy contains about 300 billion stars, of which several billion (extrapolating from our current observations) are likely to have planets sufficiently like ours that conditions similar to those where life arose here will occur. There are about 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe (probably more outside of this sphere), and it's entirely possible that there are other universes. Do you really think it unlikely that given about 10 billion years on around a quintillion stars, it is unlikely for complex life to evolve even once? Keep in mind the anthropic principle (in summary, emergent life will always observe its surroundings to be suitable for life because otherwise life would not have emerged). If there is a 0.000000000000000001 probability of life like ours (i.e. DNA based) emerging on a planet like ours somewhere in the universe each year, then you'd expect it to be happening on a very regular basis.
I remember in the '90s the Innovations catalogue sold inflatable thermal desalination rafts. You inflated them and they floated on the sea concentrating sunlight on the surface like a greenhouse. The water evaporated and then condensed on the inside of the glass and trickled out into the edges. They produced about 2 pints of water per day and were intended to be kept on life rafts (they couldn't operate on them, but they could float beside them and work, as long as there was sunshine). I presume they haven't stopped existing in the last 15 years...
Yeah its the American's fault, people in Europe love mishapen brown fruit.
Walk around a French market. Walk around an American market. You will notice that, in comparison with their French counterparts, the American fruit and vegetables are:
bigger,
brighter colours,
more regularly shaped,
almost totally without flavour
The same is true in much of Europe, although in the UK we tend further in the American direction than most of the rest of Europe (more true in supermarkets than markets).
Judging by my experience in the USA, this is categorically untrue. US consumers will happily tolerate vegetables that taste of (slightly) crunchy water. What they won't buy is vegetables that look imperfect. Imperfections in the taste and texture are fine.
I'm not surprised. It tastes nice. The leaves, dried and sprinkled on food as a seasoning work nicely with a lot of Mediterranean food. Unfortunately, the only effect THC seems to have on me is to cause splitting headaches, so I've only tried this a couple of times. If you could get the same taste without the drug content (no idea how easy this is - there are probably existing varieties of the plant that give this), you could sell it in the same sort of tiny 10g-for-£1 jars that other dried herbs come in and you'd get lots of buyers...
I'm not sure about the countryside, but this has been done in cities for a while. It's pretty common for people who are growing cannabis to do put halogen lights up in their attic so that the plants can get bright light for a long period. Because this is above the layer of normal house insulation, their roofs show up as warmer than the surroundings.
No, they're people with a basic grasp of economics. A person earning minimum wage has to spend all, or close to all, of their income on things that will be taxed with a consumption tax. A person with a comfortable middle class income will be able to spend maybe half of their income on taxable things and invest the rest. A wealthy person only spends a tiny fraction of their income. Therefore, the poorest a person is the higher a percentage of their income is paid with a consumption tax.
And no free ones for developers. I wish they'd provide an easy-to-install version of the software for some mass-market phone. I just bought an HTC Desire (the original, now two years old), because with a 1GHz GPU, 800x480 AMOLED screen, and 512MB of RAM, it seemed like it has pretty decent specs. I paid £100 (no contract). It has an unlocked bootloader, so I can install something like Cyanogen on it trivially. If I could install the OpenMoko stuff, I'd be tempted to play with it and contribute a bit. But I'm not going to pay 7 times as much for a device with an unfinished software stack. Once they have a decent set of software, they could approach HTC, Samsung, or whoever and get them to do a version of one of their phones with it installed by default. Right now, the thing the project needs most is developer buy-in, and that won't happen if you say 'please contribute to our project, entry fee €666'.
Something Robin Milner said that has stuck with me:
Credit for an invention does not go to the first person to invent something. It goes to the person who explains it well enough that no one else needs to invent it again afterwards.
Closed book probably was quite valuable in the past. When looking something up meant a physical trip to a library, or even waiting weeks for an interlibrary loan, having facts available for recall was very valuable. Now that you can connect to vast databases and get facts instantly, it isn't. I skim-read a lot of papers because I don't have to actually understand them enough to be able to reproduce them, I just need to know who is doing important work in which bits of the field so that if I have to do anything in that area I can go back and read their work in more detail. Or, as some wag on IRC put it, my brain is L1 cache for the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
There are even more subtle examples. I'm not sure if it's still there, but one of the examples from the old Mac HIGs was the owl. In most European cultures, it is associated with wisdom, so it makes a good icon for a help system. This, however, is not universal and in some places owls are associated with the occult and with evil. People in these locales generally won't expect to click on an owl when they want help, unless it's to curse the idiot who designed the UI that is confusing them.
It's actually more complicated than that. JavaScript is not an implementation of ECMAScript, it is a dialect of ECMAScript. There are JavaScript specifications published independently of ECMA. After a new ECMAScript release, the new features usually contain some things that were already in JavaScript, and the next JavaScript specification usually includes the things that were introduced in ECMAScript.
If there's a tool for removing RMS, please share it!
The third explanation in this thread, and not the correct one either.
Originally, Hungarian notation was used by the Apps group in Microsoft. It was used to indicate things that were not expressed in the C type system. For example, an integer referring to a column number in a spreadsheet would be colsFoo, while another referring to a row would be rowsFoo. If you wrote something like if (rowCurrent When the Systems group adopted the convention, they started using it for the variable type, not its meaning. This completely defeated the point, but the Systems group version was the one that caught on due to their greater influence within the company.
C is one of the few Algol-family languages where this is actually necessary. In most others, you can create a columns type and a rows type that are both integers but can not be implicitly cast to the other.
is that an API does not break "unwritten" conventions like always returning true even when the operation was unsuccessful
Most POSIX APIs return true on error and false on failure. The idea is that this lets you write if (something()) { error_handler(); }. I've no idea why they thought this made more sense than if (!something()), but judging by the rest of UNIX I suspect that they had to type their code in morse with one hand while fighting a tiger with the other, so every character saved could mean the difference between life and death...
Uh, what? Ah, I see. You don't know the difference between a state and a town.
Nope. Aeroplanes may be regarded as the territory of the nation where they are registered (but often aren't when on the ground). Airports are regarded as the parts of the country containing them, with the occasional exemption for border control (for example, Schiphol airport has the schengen line running right down the middle of it) to make life easier for customs and border control, but even on the 'other country' side of the lines the local laws still apply.
So you spin off a wholly owned subsidiary to do the management. AT&T leases them the buildings for $10bn a year. If they make less from them than that, then it's a tax write-off. If they make more than that, AT&T gets a dividend.
Not really, because they're quite geographically diverse. $100bn sounds a lot, buy then that's only $2bn per state. Given the cost of office space in city centres, that can be as little as one floor of an office building in each major population centre in the USA. Finding someone who wants to buy it all is likely to be impossible, but finding people who want each bit should be quite easy. On the other hand, finding someone willing to pay 15% of the sale price per annum is also probably quite easy, so it's a bit surprising that they want to sell it - $15bn / year in the profit column would probably look quite good on the balance sheet and would mean that they could easily reclaim some of it if they needed more space in the future. Unfortunately, execs get bigger bonuses if they sell off assets that aren't needed right now...
It's not people who have no friends, it's people who interact with their friends in person...
That is, unless your developers belong behind a McDonald's counter in the first place.
Which is often the case for web developers or, at least, the people who hire web developers. To an even greater degree than most of the rest of the industry, they are judged by UI first, scalability and performance second, and security a very distant third.
Why scan them all? I bet you only need about a 10% of them actually scanned the rest you simply have to store in case they might be needed.
Working out which ones are in that 10% is a lot easier once they are scanned and searchable. And, by the time they're scanned, there isn't much of an advantage in deleting them...
His point about Muslims is irrelevant, because the original point is that the Christians crusades are an example of people doing bad things in the name of religion. The fact that Muslims also did bad things in the name of religion is not a counter argument.
If the Christian who believes in God and tries to live a moral life acting in kindness towards his neighbours is wrong, when he dies he finds he goes nowhere after death but has lived a good moral life while here on earth.
And if he's spent a large proportion of his life trying to convert people? Or if he's lived a less moral life due to his religion, for example by participating in a holy war, or by helping spread AIDS by preaching against the use of condoms in Africa?
If the atheist is wrong, though he may have lived a moral life, he will still have to stand before God and explain his unbelief.
And this belief is entirely possible to justify rationally. If God does exist and is not capable of being swayed by rational argument, then you're fucked anyway. If God doesn't exist, then it doesn't matter. If God does exist and is rational, then he will accept that atheism is a rational position. You act as if the only two choices Christianity and atheism. This is the flaw in Pascal's wager. There are at more than two religions that say that you will go to some form of hell if you don't belong to them. Each one has exactly the same amount of verifiable evidence for them (i.e. none). If one is true and you believe the wrong one, you go to hell. If one is true and you don't believe either, you still go to hell. You maybe gain slightly on the odds, but some religions (including the abrahamic religions) regard worshiping a false god as being worse than worshiping no god, so even that's a bit of a stretch.
If a Christian dies and discovers that the Valkyries come to take dead people off to feast with Odin, do you really think that the fact that he believed in an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity will be something the Valkyrie will care about?
As for proof... look around at nature. Can you honestly believe it was all an accident? A random chance due to some atoms rattling around until they got in the right order?
The only kind of person who can't believe this is someone who has absolutely no concept of how big the universe is and how long it took. It took billions of years for life to form on this planet. This galaxy contains about 300 billion stars, of which several billion (extrapolating from our current observations) are likely to have planets sufficiently like ours that conditions similar to those where life arose here will occur. There are about 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe (probably more outside of this sphere), and it's entirely possible that there are other universes. Do you really think it unlikely that given about 10 billion years on around a quintillion stars, it is unlikely for complex life to evolve even once? Keep in mind the anthropic principle (in summary, emergent life will always observe its surroundings to be suitable for life because otherwise life would not have emerged). If there is a 0.000000000000000001 probability of life like ours (i.e. DNA based) emerging on a planet like ours somewhere in the universe each year, then you'd expect it to be happening on a very regular basis.
I remember in the '90s the Innovations catalogue sold inflatable thermal desalination rafts. You inflated them and they floated on the sea concentrating sunlight on the surface like a greenhouse. The water evaporated and then condensed on the inside of the glass and trickled out into the edges. They produced about 2 pints of water per day and were intended to be kept on life rafts (they couldn't operate on them, but they could float beside them and work, as long as there was sunshine). I presume they haven't stopped existing in the last 15 years...
Just think of this as a robotic pig...
Yeah its the American's fault, people in Europe love mishapen brown fruit.
Walk around a French market. Walk around an American market. You will notice that, in comparison with their French counterparts, the American fruit and vegetables are:
The same is true in much of Europe, although in the UK we tend further in the American direction than most of the rest of Europe (more true in supermarkets than markets).
the US consumer wont buy imperfect produce
Judging by my experience in the USA, this is categorically untrue. US consumers will happily tolerate vegetables that taste of (slightly) crunchy water. What they won't buy is vegetables that look imperfect. Imperfections in the taste and texture are fine.
a lot of animals like the smell and taste of it
I'm not surprised. It tastes nice. The leaves, dried and sprinkled on food as a seasoning work nicely with a lot of Mediterranean food. Unfortunately, the only effect THC seems to have on me is to cause splitting headaches, so I've only tried this a couple of times. If you could get the same taste without the drug content (no idea how easy this is - there are probably existing varieties of the plant that give this), you could sell it in the same sort of tiny 10g-for-£1 jars that other dried herbs come in and you'd get lots of buyers...
I'm not sure about the countryside, but this has been done in cities for a while. It's pretty common for people who are growing cannabis to do put halogen lights up in their attic so that the plants can get bright light for a long period. Because this is above the layer of normal house insulation, their roofs show up as warmer than the surroundings.
A device that lets you tell if someone has snuck tobacco into your spliff, without having to taste the smoke.
No, they're people with a basic grasp of economics. A person earning minimum wage has to spend all, or close to all, of their income on things that will be taxed with a consumption tax. A person with a comfortable middle class income will be able to spend maybe half of their income on taxable things and invest the rest. A wealthy person only spends a tiny fraction of their income. Therefore, the poorest a person is the higher a percentage of their income is paid with a consumption tax.
And no free ones for developers. I wish they'd provide an easy-to-install version of the software for some mass-market phone. I just bought an HTC Desire (the original, now two years old), because with a 1GHz GPU, 800x480 AMOLED screen, and 512MB of RAM, it seemed like it has pretty decent specs. I paid £100 (no contract). It has an unlocked bootloader, so I can install something like Cyanogen on it trivially. If I could install the OpenMoko stuff, I'd be tempted to play with it and contribute a bit. But I'm not going to pay 7 times as much for a device with an unfinished software stack. Once they have a decent set of software, they could approach HTC, Samsung, or whoever and get them to do a version of one of their phones with it installed by default. Right now, the thing the project needs most is developer buy-in, and that won't happen if you say 'please contribute to our project, entry fee €666'.
Something Robin Milner said that has stuck with me:
Credit for an invention does not go to the first person to invent something. It goes to the person who explains it well enough that no one else needs to invent it again afterwards.
Closed book probably was quite valuable in the past. When looking something up meant a physical trip to a library, or even waiting weeks for an interlibrary loan, having facts available for recall was very valuable. Now that you can connect to vast databases and get facts instantly, it isn't. I skim-read a lot of papers because I don't have to actually understand them enough to be able to reproduce them, I just need to know who is doing important work in which bits of the field so that if I have to do anything in that area I can go back and read their work in more detail. Or, as some wag on IRC put it, my brain is L1 cache for the Internet.