For quick prototyping, use Python or Ruby. Or even Perl, if you really can't help yourself.
Yes, the lack of top-level functions in Java is well-known criticism (at least from the Python/Ruby crowd), but personally I've never had any problems with that, mostly because I don't use Java for quick scripts. The constant need to cast everything is a much bigger problem, IMO.
I think that most poor use of C++ can be traced to the use of C++.
This is an extremely important point. Use the right tool for the job. C++ is not the right tool for most jobs it's being used for. It's probably fine for low-level systems programming (the same stuff you'd use C for), but the only excuse to use it for large applications is if you're stuck in the late '80s and there's nothing better availlable. Now there are far superior languages availlable, so learn to pick the right one for the job.
Real Programmers can do Object Oriented Programming in FORTRAN... Well, maybe not, but you can certainly lay out a (regular) C program using some of the basic OOP principles - its just up to you to "enforce" them (like everything in C).
True, but Real Programmers also know not to use C for things it's not intended to. C is for high-performance systems programming, maintainable application programming is much easier and faster with a higher level language.
Let's not forget my favorite: "Java is the future of everything."
Everything is an exaggeration (Java isn't very big on low-level system/OS programming as far as I know), but on the application level, Java is the biggest, most succesful language ever, so he wasn't far off.
Too many people these days have little or no exposure to C++, and never learn how programming in the absence of garbage collection works.
Most people don't need exposure to C++, because most people don't do any systems programming. C++ is for operating systems and drivers, and was never intended for application programming. I think it makes most sense for people to start on something like Java (or Lisp, perhaps), and once they've figured out they want to do systems programming, teach them C and C++. If, instead, they want to go towards application programming, teach them a higher level language like Python or Ruby.
It is especially problematic in our research labs, where computationally complex problems must be solved with very fast code, but the people writing it get completely confused by pointers and memory management. Worse is when a proof-of-concept is distributed, with horrible bugs and completely incomprehensible code.
Sounds like they chose the wrong language for the job. Computationally complex research problems and proofs of concept shouldn't be written in a language that requires manual memory management. Often, functional languages (Lisp, Haskell) are best for that sort of thing.
It's a nice balance because with Java EVERYTHING is an object and it's likely to confuse freshman.
Actually, one of the problems with Java is that not everything is an object. That's why I think Java will eventually be replaced by something much more Ruby-like (but with a bit more performance, please). But Java was written to replace C++ at the application level, and as such it does a tremendous job.
I admit I've never played the game or seen it played, but from reviews on TV I get the impression that this title (which suggests some sort of extreme violence) is actually about ogling girls in skimpy bikinis performing assorted outdoor activities.
We don't just need clear signals, be need explicitly stated intentions. Say "I want sex". Then we understand you.
Fortunately my wife is aware of this and doesn't expect me to pick up on subtle clues. When she wants something from me, she tells me so. I love her very much.
An interesting follow up would be to look at men and womens abilities to communicate their emotional states to others of the same sex, and also broaden the range of "intents" studied towards the opposite sex.
That's exactly what I was thinking. If men understand the sexual intentions of other men, and women don't understand the sexual intentions of other women, then it's clearly the women who don't communicate clearly. If women understand each other but men don't, then it's men who are obvlivious. If men understand each other and women understand each other, but men don't understand women and vice versa, then it's the "women from Venus, men from Mars" thing". And if everybody has trouble understanding other people's sexual intentions, then people in general are unclear or oblivious about sexual intentions.
It's that men from Mars, women from Venus thingy.
That depends on the findings of the follow-up study.
PC gaming is dying because nVidia released a card that isn't quite as spectacular as hoped? ATI is releasing excellent top-of-the-line cards at the moment, and for people who mislaid their brain, Crossfire is a perfectly viable alternative to SLI. But nobody with a functioning brain would even consider putting such a ridiculous amount of graphical power in a system. One $150 card gives you way more graphical power than any console has, and more than enough for all current PC games. If you really do need 1920x1440 with 4x AA, a mere PS3 isn't going to cut it for you anyway.
But the real reason why PC games aren't going to die any time soon: the mouse. Only the Wii has an interface that might come close to the versatility of the mouse, but it lacks the speed and precision. With the other consoles you're stuck using thumbsticks. That might be perfectly fine for some games, but not nearly all. Strategy gamers, for example, really can't do without a PC.
With the $300-$500 console, you can play all the newest games.
No you can't. You can only play games that have been released for that console, and generally, the only games released for consoles at all are games that are able to make use of those crappy controlers. Consoles don't come with a mouse, and a mouse is still by far the superior game interface.
Do you have any idea how much of a pain it would be to play Civilization 4 with thumbsticks? With a PC, you're a lot less limited in the type of games you can play.
IntelliPower is a complex way for WD to act mysterious about the drive's actual rotation speed. So here's the facts as I've found them on various forums and review sites:
The SE16 GP rotates at 5400 rpm, the RE2 GP rotates at 7200 rpm. WD doesn't want to tell us this because lots of people think that 5400 rpm means it's slow. It's not. The SE16 GP performs like an average 7200 rpm drive (better than a 1TB Seagate, for example), and you're unlikely to really notice the performance difference with the real top-performers. And it uses less than half the power and makes only a fraction of the noise.
What I don't know is how well the RE2 GP performs, but if it's practically identical, except for the higher rotation speed, I'd expect it to have spectacular performance. Not that you'd notice that performance in normal circumstances, but if lots of rapid disk actions really is that important to you, the RE2 is probably a very good choice. For anyone else, the SE16 GP is a brilliant choice.
It didn't make it onto that stupid list of 100 best films (give me a break).
I actually agree that 2001 is not one of the 100 best films. The good scenes are absolutely brilliant, and the special effects are unsurpassed, but the story moves glacially slow. It's a very tedious and boring film to watch. It's a film you should have seen, but not one to go see. And this is not just contrast with today's high energy action movies, it really is one of the slowest moving films ever, with the possible exception of Solaris.
I love Clarke's stories, and I'm a big fan of almost everything Kubrick has done (except possibly Eyes Wide Shut), but 2001 is just too slow, too tedious to watch. What was Kubrick thinking?
Although the hours of tedious boredom interspersed with short moments of brilliance is probably an accurate representation of space travel.
To me, bookmarks are mostly for reference sites. For stuff I want to keep permanently, not stories I want to read once. Yet often I encounter a link with a story or movie I want to check out at a more appropriate time, so I leave it open in a tab.
Ofcourse it's also possible, when fixing an issue, that I've got a tab with a list of all outstanding issues, one tab for each issue, one tab with the production version of the site, one tab with the test version, one tab with the dev version, and usually a couple more tabs with all sorts of debugging information.
As to why I keep everything on all the time, I usually have a lot open, and when I want to turn the PC off, I need to close a lot of programs, all of which I have to start again when I turn the PC on again. Since I'm lazy, I usually just leave it on. Or use hibernate. Which is a pain, because Windows' hibernate suffers from some odd bug that makes it slower each time it recovers from hibernation.
And since I always leave everything on, I also have stuff open that I haven't used in days, so my desktop gets a bit cluttered. I'm not saying this is an efficient way to work. It just happens to be the way I work.
Which is exactly the point of why a memory-hogging application is bad. I don't think anyone is experiencing problems with what you call basic web browsing, but we all have moments when we suddenly end up with 10+ windows.
I rarely have less than 20 web pages open. I'm counting 36 tabs in my Opera window right now. And I thought I had a second Opera window a couple of days ago, but I think I accidentally killed it. Opera still lacks a feature to undo that.
Opera is just as capable of feeling sluggish as any other browser. My Opera (9.26) often freezes or slows to a crawl when it's loading a couple of pages while I click around on tabs. Although admittedly this only happens when it's using around 600 MB, whereas Firefox 2 starts to slow down when using about 300 MB.
After a couple of bad experiences with Firefox I now use Opera for all my heavy web browsing, and it turns out Opera has its limits just like any other browser. But you don't reach them quite as fast as in Firefox 2 (not to mention the memory hog that Firefox 1.5 was; 2.0 is infinitely better).
How is that different from a typical Linux usage? I still need root access (via sudo or root) to update my OS and installed programs.
OS yes, but you don't have to be root to install or update programs. I've seen lots of systems where programs were owned by bin, public or some other user. But more importantly, modern distributions like Ubuntu encourage you to use sudo, and that's almost infinitely safer than actually logging in as root.
I can play video games, do video editing, listen to music, surf the web, use office and work from home via VPN and all that without being logged in as administrator. Where is the problem?
Installing new software. I'm a programmer, and I often need to install some new tool. For that reason, all programmers at my work have Administrator rights on their standard Windows login. In linux, I could install those tools in ~/bin, and while I'm sure that's usually technically possible in Windows (though some programs really do not like to be installed in \Documents and settings\, if only for a the spaces in the directory name), it is at the very least very uncommon.
The real problem here may not be technological, but cultural. In unix culture, it's common for users to install stuff in ~/bin, but in Windows culture, that's uncommon. It's much more common to give everybody who needs to install stuff Administrator rights. And that's where your technically sound security model breaks down.
I had 28.8k dialup in 1998. I can download at 6mb steady from home now. I can't see it being 10 years before I reach the numbers you are saying will take "decades"
In 1998 I nearly had what you have TODAY. And it's barely doubled since then. What I'm saying is you're highly unlikely to see the same increase you saw going from 28.8 to high-speed service, because so far, that's been the last big increase. Everything has been tiny since then. There's been no real indication of massive technology increases since ditching dial-up. At least none that are available to the masses in any real form.
What about glass fiber? In 1998 I used my uni's T1 connection, and I may have had some sort of crappy dial-up at home. Two years later I had the same cable I still have. In a few months I'll have a 20Mbit glass fiber connection for EUR20 or 30 a month, and that's the cheapest version they have. I could go for 50Mbit if I want. That is a pretty big step up compared to cable. (Though not quite as big as from 28k8 to cable, obviously. I think ISDN is in the gap between those.)
Unfortunately glass fiber isn't anywhere universal. I'm lucky enough to be living in one of the first neighbourhoods in Amsterdam to get it, but some other cities already have glass fiber. In 10 years, surely most cities should technically be able to have glass fiber to every home. Whether they actually will have it, is more a matter of politics and economics than one of technological progress. If enough people demand it, it will happen.
He is as legendery as game programmers get. I guess that there are some people that wouldn't know a "legendary game programmer" but it is usually those that hang out in cool places, not/.
Well, you save $30. Wasn't a HDDVD player $100? And $330 for BluRay means a total of $430. Now you only have to play $400. Or nothing, ofcourse, if you don't care about HD content anyway.
Again.. it is the effect on a developing zygote/fetus's brain which is at question... where negligible amounts of a variety of things will have a dramatic effect on the development of that person.
a slight bit of alcohol which in an adult has no lasting effect can devastate a developing brain. The mass of a fetus's nearby family is really just part of an existing background mass of the earth which is fairly constant... we're talking about the effect of extrasolar bodies which are only a factor when they are a factor, as in we change position relative to them as our solar system and galaxy orbits and spins...
You're not making a lot of sense here. How the hell can the mass of extrasolar objects be a factor at all? How the hell can you ignore the mass of nearby family members, geneologists and midwives as constant background mass? It is the mass of stars that is constant and seriously negligible background mass, not the other way around.
By far the biggest effect on the gravity exerted on a fetus or newborn baby is the latitude at which it is. Anything else is negligible, but if you want to count it anyway, whether daddy is holding mommy's left hand or right hand is a far bigger factor than some distant stars.
Womens' cycle is ~28 days regardless of when it starts... why this period of time? coincidence?
Exactly. Other mammals have periods of different length. Most great apes are between a month and a month-and-a-half, but other animals can have wildly different periods, up to half a year or a year.
Oh, I agree. That sort of willful ignorance needs to be resisted, particularly because calling their medieval attitude "Christian" may mislead other Christians who might otherwise be open to a more informed view of history. As far as I know, this sort of fundamentalism really is a tiny minority in many Christian countries, and it's only this vocal and influential in the US and some countries in Africa.
Unfortunately for all of us Astrology is one of those concepts that can't be proven/debunked over night or even over a year or 10 years.
Perhaps not the idea behind astrology, but existing astrological methods have been quite thoroughly disproven, and that doesn't have to take all that much time.
We all know that the moon does in fact have an effect on us (the easiest scientific theorem is that since we are 90+% water there should be a tidal effect
What does our water content have to do with the tidal effect? All mass is affected by tidal forces, no matter what chemical compounds it's made up off. But how would such tiny fluctuations in gravity have such an influence on a person's life? And how does that compare to the much bigger gravitic changes you experience when riding and elevator, rollercoaster, or moving to a different latitude?
and then there is the eerie connection with a women's menstrual cycle).
What eerie connection? Are you claiming all women's cycle are in phase with the lunar cycle? I assure you they're not. Different women living in the same country can have their periods at totally different times. Only when a group of women spends a very large time together, do their menstrual cycles synchronise. That's because it's a hormonal and not an astrological phenomenon.
Also it is quite obvious that the sun has an effect on us (radiation, solar flares, etc.) and that our proximity to it due to the earth's elliptical orbit can change the amount though imperceptible in day to day life unless you're looking for it.
If that was relevant to astrology, then every human on earth would have the same horoscope (although they might vary by latitude). Interestingly, studies have shown that that is indeed the case: a well written horoscope will be accepted by anyone who's open to such things, no matter whether the horoscope actually corresponds to their actual astrological sign.
So given these examples, why would the other planets not have an effect upon us? or better yet, specific alignments of these forces which act upon us in concert? Especially significant would be the effect any forces might have on our developing psyche during our gestation period and immediately after our birth... environmental factors can have a huge impact on a child in the infant stage.
What kind of forces are you talking about here? Surely not gravity, because that's negligible compared to the mass of the fetus's nearby family members. So what kind of force do the planets emit that influences us so? And why does the influence of that force vary compared to the planets position relative to the earth?
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For quick prototyping, use Python or Ruby. Or even Perl, if you really can't help yourself.
Yes, the lack of top-level functions in Java is well-known criticism (at least from the Python/Ruby crowd), but personally I've never had any problems with that, mostly because I don't use Java for quick scripts. The constant need to cast everything is a much bigger problem, IMO.
This is an extremely important point. Use the right tool for the job. C++ is not the right tool for most jobs it's being used for. It's probably fine for low-level systems programming (the same stuff you'd use C for), but the only excuse to use it for large applications is if you're stuck in the late '80s and there's nothing better availlable. Now there are far superior languages availlable, so learn to pick the right one for the job.
True, but Real Programmers also know not to use C for things it's not intended to. C is for high-performance systems programming, maintainable application programming is much easier and faster with a higher level language.
Everything is an exaggeration (Java isn't very big on low-level system/OS programming as far as I know), but on the application level, Java is the biggest, most succesful language ever, so he wasn't far off.
Visual J++ was an obvious dead end, however.
Most people don't need exposure to C++, because most people don't do any systems programming. C++ is for operating systems and drivers, and was never intended for application programming. I think it makes most sense for people to start on something like Java (or Lisp, perhaps), and once they've figured out they want to do systems programming, teach them C and C++. If, instead, they want to go towards application programming, teach them a higher level language like Python or Ruby.
It is especially problematic in our research labs, where computationally complex problems must be solved with very fast code, but the people writing it get completely confused by pointers and memory management. Worse is when a proof-of-concept is distributed, with horrible bugs and completely incomprehensible code.Sounds like they chose the wrong language for the job. Computationally complex research problems and proofs of concept shouldn't be written in a language that requires manual memory management. Often, functional languages (Lisp, Haskell) are best for that sort of thing.
Actually, one of the problems with Java is that not everything is an object. That's why I think Java will eventually be replaced by something much more Ruby-like (but with a bit more performance, please). But Java was written to replace C++ at the application level, and as such it does a tremendous job.
I admit I've never played the game or seen it played, but from reviews on TV I get the impression that this title (which suggests some sort of extreme violence) is actually about ogling girls in skimpy bikinis performing assorted outdoor activities.
We don't just need clear signals, be need explicitly stated intentions. Say "I want sex". Then we understand you.
Fortunately my wife is aware of this and doesn't expect me to pick up on subtle clues. When she wants something from me, she tells me so. I love her very much.
That's exactly what I was thinking. If men understand the sexual intentions of other men, and women don't understand the sexual intentions of other women, then it's clearly the women who don't communicate clearly. If women understand each other but men don't, then it's men who are obvlivious. If men understand each other and women understand each other, but men don't understand women and vice versa, then it's the "women from Venus, men from Mars" thing". And if everybody has trouble understanding other people's sexual intentions, then people in general are unclear or oblivious about sexual intentions.
It's that men from Mars, women from Venus thingy.That depends on the findings of the follow-up study.
PC gaming is dying because nVidia released a card that isn't quite as spectacular as hoped? ATI is releasing excellent top-of-the-line cards at the moment, and for people who mislaid their brain, Crossfire is a perfectly viable alternative to SLI. But nobody with a functioning brain would even consider putting such a ridiculous amount of graphical power in a system. One $150 card gives you way more graphical power than any console has, and more than enough for all current PC games. If you really do need 1920x1440 with 4x AA, a mere PS3 isn't going to cut it for you anyway.
But the real reason why PC games aren't going to die any time soon: the mouse. Only the Wii has an interface that might come close to the versatility of the mouse, but it lacks the speed and precision. With the other consoles you're stuck using thumbsticks. That might be perfectly fine for some games, but not nearly all. Strategy gamers, for example, really can't do without a PC.
No you can't. You can only play games that have been released for that console, and generally, the only games released for consoles at all are games that are able to make use of those crappy controlers. Consoles don't come with a mouse, and a mouse is still by far the superior game interface.
Do you have any idea how much of a pain it would be to play Civilization 4 with thumbsticks? With a PC, you're a lot less limited in the type of games you can play.
IntelliPower is a complex way for WD to act mysterious about the drive's actual rotation speed. So here's the facts as I've found them on various forums and review sites:
The SE16 GP rotates at 5400 rpm, the RE2 GP rotates at 7200 rpm. WD doesn't want to tell us this because lots of people think that 5400 rpm means it's slow. It's not. The SE16 GP performs like an average 7200 rpm drive (better than a 1TB Seagate, for example), and you're unlikely to really notice the performance difference with the real top-performers. And it uses less than half the power and makes only a fraction of the noise.
What I don't know is how well the RE2 GP performs, but if it's practically identical, except for the higher rotation speed, I'd expect it to have spectacular performance. Not that you'd notice that performance in normal circumstances, but if lots of rapid disk actions really is that important to you, the RE2 is probably a very good choice. For anyone else, the SE16 GP is a brilliant choice.
Therefore, any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
I actually agree that 2001 is not one of the 100 best films. The good scenes are absolutely brilliant, and the special effects are unsurpassed, but the story moves glacially slow. It's a very tedious and boring film to watch. It's a film you should have seen, but not one to go see. And this is not just contrast with today's high energy action movies, it really is one of the slowest moving films ever, with the possible exception of Solaris.
I love Clarke's stories, and I'm a big fan of almost everything Kubrick has done (except possibly Eyes Wide Shut), but 2001 is just too slow, too tedious to watch. What was Kubrick thinking?
Although the hours of tedious boredom interspersed with short moments of brilliance is probably an accurate representation of space travel.
To me, bookmarks are mostly for reference sites. For stuff I want to keep permanently, not stories I want to read once. Yet often I encounter a link with a story or movie I want to check out at a more appropriate time, so I leave it open in a tab.
Ofcourse it's also possible, when fixing an issue, that I've got a tab with a list of all outstanding issues, one tab for each issue, one tab with the production version of the site, one tab with the test version, one tab with the dev version, and usually a couple more tabs with all sorts of debugging information.
As to why I keep everything on all the time, I usually have a lot open, and when I want to turn the PC off, I need to close a lot of programs, all of which I have to start again when I turn the PC on again. Since I'm lazy, I usually just leave it on. Or use hibernate. Which is a pain, because Windows' hibernate suffers from some odd bug that makes it slower each time it recovers from hibernation.
And since I always leave everything on, I also have stuff open that I haven't used in days, so my desktop gets a bit cluttered. I'm not saying this is an efficient way to work. It just happens to be the way I work.
I rarely have less than 20 web pages open. I'm counting 36 tabs in my Opera window right now. And I thought I had a second Opera window a couple of days ago, but I think I accidentally killed it. Opera still lacks a feature to undo that.
Opera is just as capable of feeling sluggish as any other browser. My Opera (9.26) often freezes or slows to a crawl when it's loading a couple of pages while I click around on tabs. Although admittedly this only happens when it's using around 600 MB, whereas Firefox 2 starts to slow down when using about 300 MB.
After a couple of bad experiences with Firefox I now use Opera for all my heavy web browsing, and it turns out Opera has its limits just like any other browser. But you don't reach them quite as fast as in Firefox 2 (not to mention the memory hog that Firefox 1.5 was; 2.0 is infinitely better).
OS yes, but you don't have to be root to install or update programs. I've seen lots of systems where programs were owned by bin, public or some other user. But more importantly, modern distributions like Ubuntu encourage you to use sudo, and that's almost infinitely safer than actually logging in as root.
I can play video games, do video editing, listen to music, surf the web, use office and work from home via VPN and all that without being logged in as administrator. Where is the problem?Installing new software. I'm a programmer, and I often need to install some new tool. For that reason, all programmers at my work have Administrator rights on their standard Windows login. In linux, I could install those tools in ~/bin, and while I'm sure that's usually technically possible in Windows (though some programs really do not like to be installed in \Documents and settings\, if only for a the spaces in the directory name), it is at the very least very uncommon.
The real problem here may not be technological, but cultural. In unix culture, it's common for users to install stuff in ~/bin, but in Windows culture, that's uncommon. It's much more common to give everybody who needs to install stuff Administrator rights. And that's where your technically sound security model breaks down.
I had 28.8k dialup in 1998. I can download at 6mb steady from home now. I can't see it being 10 years before I reach the numbers you are saying will take "decades"
In 1998 I nearly had what you have TODAY. And it's barely doubled since then. What I'm saying is you're highly unlikely to see the same increase you saw going from 28.8 to high-speed service, because so far, that's been the last big increase. Everything has been tiny since then. There's been no real indication of massive technology increases since ditching dial-up. At least none that are available to the masses in any real form.What about glass fiber? In 1998 I used my uni's T1 connection, and I may have had some sort of crappy dial-up at home. Two years later I had the same cable I still have. In a few months I'll have a 20Mbit glass fiber connection for EUR20 or 30 a month, and that's the cheapest version they have. I could go for 50Mbit if I want. That is a pretty big step up compared to cable. (Though not quite as big as from 28k8 to cable, obviously. I think ISDN is in the gap between those.)
Unfortunately glass fiber isn't anywhere universal. I'm lucky enough to be living in one of the first neighbourhoods in Amsterdam to get it, but some other cities already have glass fiber. In 10 years, surely most cities should technically be able to have glass fiber to every home. Whether they actually will have it, is more a matter of politics and economics than one of technological progress. If enough people demand it, it will happen.
Didn't John Carmack post here some time?
Well, you save $30. Wasn't a HDDVD player $100? And $330 for BluRay means a total of $430. Now you only have to play $400. Or nothing, ofcourse, if you don't care about HD content anyway.
a slight bit of alcohol which in an adult has no lasting effect can devastate a developing brain. The mass of a fetus's nearby family is really just part of an existing background mass of the earth which is fairly constant... we're talking about the effect of extrasolar bodies which are only a factor when they are a factor, as in we change position relative to them as our solar system and galaxy orbits and spins...
You're not making a lot of sense here. How the hell can the mass of extrasolar objects be a factor at all? How the hell can you ignore the mass of nearby family members, geneologists and midwives as constant background mass? It is the mass of stars that is constant and seriously negligible background mass, not the other way around.
By far the biggest effect on the gravity exerted on a fetus or newborn baby is the latitude at which it is. Anything else is negligible, but if you want to count it anyway, whether daddy is holding mommy's left hand or right hand is a far bigger factor than some distant stars.
Womens' cycle is ~28 days regardless of when it starts... why this period of time? coincidence?Exactly. Other mammals have periods of different length. Most great apes are between a month and a month-and-a-half, but other animals can have wildly different periods, up to half a year or a year.
Oh, I agree. That sort of willful ignorance needs to be resisted, particularly because calling their medieval attitude "Christian" may mislead other Christians who might otherwise be open to a more informed view of history. As far as I know, this sort of fundamentalism really is a tiny minority in many Christian countries, and it's only this vocal and influential in the US and some countries in Africa.
Whether scientists will (or should) be fuckers is exactly the topic under discussion.
Perhaps not the idea behind astrology, but existing astrological methods have been quite thoroughly disproven, and that doesn't have to take all that much time.
We all know that the moon does in fact have an effect on us (the easiest scientific theorem is that since we are 90+% water there should be a tidal effectWhat does our water content have to do with the tidal effect? All mass is affected by tidal forces, no matter what chemical compounds it's made up off. But how would such tiny fluctuations in gravity have such an influence on a person's life? And how does that compare to the much bigger gravitic changes you experience when riding and elevator, rollercoaster, or moving to a different latitude?
and then there is the eerie connection with a women's menstrual cycle).What eerie connection? Are you claiming all women's cycle are in phase with the lunar cycle? I assure you they're not. Different women living in the same country can have their periods at totally different times. Only when a group of women spends a very large time together, do their menstrual cycles synchronise. That's because it's a hormonal and not an astrological phenomenon.
Also it is quite obvious that the sun has an effect on us (radiation, solar flares, etc.) and that our proximity to it due to the earth's elliptical orbit can change the amount though imperceptible in day to day life unless you're looking for it.If that was relevant to astrology, then every human on earth would have the same horoscope (although they might vary by latitude). Interestingly, studies have shown that that is indeed the case: a well written horoscope will be accepted by anyone who's open to such things, no matter whether the horoscope actually corresponds to their actual astrological sign.
So given these examples, why would the other planets not have an effect upon us? or better yet, specific alignments of these forces which act upon us in concert? Especially significant would be the effect any forces might have on our developing psyche during our gestation period and immediately after our birth... environmental factors can have a huge impact on a child in the infant stage.What kind of forces are you talking about here? Surely not gravity, because that's negligible compared to the mass of the fetus's nearby family members. So what kind of force do the planets emit that influences us so? And why does the influence of that force vary compared to the planets position relative to the earth?