I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it. For that reason, the disaster that was caused when the levees broke, was partly a human engineerd disaster, not a natural disaster. Of course, many government officials talk about it as a "natural disaster" to avoid them being blamed for it. To a large extend it politics played a large role than technology. In that case politics needs fixing!
Natural disasters have occured in the past of our history, most notably the 1953 flooding due to a storm, as another replier has pointed out. But also in the past ten years we had to deal with flooding due to excessive rainfall in other parts of Europe (France, Germany), and looking at the number of floods that have occured in recent times in Europe, it is likely that such floods will reoccure, especially as climate change will continue to bring us more rain.
A large part of the Netherlands is below sea level. Only a small part of Louisiana is below sea level. The danger of the dyks breaking was well known. I remember seeing a documentary about it on Discovery some years ago.
The Netherlands is not a Federal member of the EU, and seeing the outcome of the last vote with respect to the new consitution, it looks like it is going to take a long time before it will happen. And maybe you are giving us a good reason why we should stay an independent nation for a long time.
The problem in New Orleans is that local and national governments where aware of the risk, but decided to spend their money differently. It was a calculated risk that those dyks would break.
Yesterday, I heard on the news that some of the dyks around New Orleans where build to resist water levels that only occure once every thirty years. So really, it is no surprise that they did break now. Here in the Netherlands, dyks are build to resist water levels that only occure once every tenthousand years. The only conclusion that I can draw from this, is that this disaster is not a natural disaster but a human engineerd disaster.
Beter in what sense. Yes, it gives very detailed information, but it requires a lot of clicking and thinking to get an idea of what kind of changes have been made to the text.
Yes, that is true, but it would still require you to go through a number of steps yourself and draw your own conclusion. And not for everyone this would be a trivial task to perform.
Wikipedia should introduce a "change indicator" that uses background colours to indicate which parts of the text of an article have been modified (deleted) in the past ten days.
That a certain technology is a hype does not mean that it is new. These are not really new programming models. And whether we should be happy about them, I don't know, because they seem to make thing more complicated then they are already. I wonder how long it will take until we will see some programming models that are more specification oriented, then just being another type of implementation oriented way of programming.
In a specification oriented programming model, you specify the behaviour, not all the million little steps that are needed to perform it. A specification oriented programming model is independent of the underlying techniques, such a networking protocols and marshalling techniques. I think such a specification oriented programming model should be data oriented, meaning that data is the starting point, not an event driven GUI front-end, as it is now with most programming models.
The best description I have ever read about genealogy is that it is like a court case in which you are trying to assemble facts and proof to make an argument.
This is very true, but there are few genealogist who are working according this principle, and even fewer software packages that are supporting this way of working. It seems that most programs are only about recording the conclusions of your research.
Even the GEDCOM format is not really designed according to these principles. A good genealogic program should start with describing documents and sources, and from this derive certain facts. Given a birth certificate and a marriage certificate which mentions a person with the same name and bithdate, does not imply that these absolutely are the same person, especially if they are from a large city, like New York. Yet, in most cases, you would make such an assumption. That means that every combination of "facts" should be recorded. And maybe a certainty factor should be added. If the person was born in a small village, the change that there are two persons with the same name and birthdate, is much less likely.
Why did they stop at 13.6Gyr? Why not run this simulation into the future? Looking at the pictures, it doens't look like a stable situation has been reached yet.
Please note that the last report is from May 16. That is four whole days ago. There are some images of three days ago. I guess they haven't made any substantial progress in the past days. To me it seems that they did go backwards a little, but there are also signs that some of the wheels are digging in. And they are still not out of the track. I wonder if they will ever manage to get out of them. It seems to me that the top layer of the sand was actually a little stronger than the stuff below it, and I wonder whether they will be able to get on top of it again. I guess that there is still a substantial chance that Opportunity will not get out, and that this is going to be the resting place of the rover. And mind you, that does not mean the end of science work. There is still much to learn from the daily remote sensing operations. And of course, they will make every attempt to get the rover moving again. Time is on their side.
Commercial companies are not interested in interoperability, because it only makes it easier for their customers to switch another vendor. And although these languages may look similar, it still doens not mean that it is only a matter of syntax. And as a commercial company, you are not going to change the exact semantics of your language in order to make it interoperatble with the language used by others, and let all your customers do the conversion (which is never as trivial as it seems). Microsoft tried to unify VB, C++ and Java in the.Net environment. And see what came from it.
To improve lubrication the rovers have been driving backwards a lot of times lately. I remember they started doing this when one of the front wheels of the Spirit rover started to show more friction. After driving in reverse the friction became less.
When electricity becomes expensive (compared to today) - then solar power becomes more attractive.
When electricity becomes expensive, the cost for producing solar cells (which use a lot of electricity) will rise like wise. Most people don't realize that solar cells are more like batteries than anything else. They need a huge amouth of energy to produce and then for a long periode will give a little amouth of energy back. Under ideal conditions, they will return about ten times more energy then is required to produce them. But then if you take into account the losses for storing that energy and converting it into something usefull, it might only be a factor two.
The funny thing is that at the moment it is the right time to invest in solar cells, because oil prices are still relatively low. Wait until they have gone up by a factor ten in the coming decades, and you might have saved some cheap energy for the future.
For some strange reason, it always happens that when a certain resource starts to become rare, we as people start to use it up faster as long as it is available, until there is a total collapse of the system. If you are only in your twenties, I guess it is quite likely you will die from poverty.
It has been almost ten years ago that they decided to select VB as their development platform. At that time it was the only platform available that allowed you to develop GUI without having to write incredible amouth of Win32 API calls in C. This was before the development of MFC. In the past ten years about five people on average worked on that application. And it went already through several redesigns.
When developing a commercial application you often have no other choice than to select from the available tools if you want to finish your application before your competor does. And most often you are quit restricted in your choices, if you want to deliver fast and cheap. It is very difficult to look in the future, and often the people managing software development are not aware of the fact that every "short time" decision often has "long term" effects. The name software is very misleading, because over and over again reality proofs that "software" is much harder than "hardware". The hardware we have is completely different from the one that we had ten years ago. Everything has changed. It is relatively cheap to change hardware, even to change hardware interfaces, compared to the cost of changing software to another development platform.
In VB6 any class that is defined as public automatically has a COM interface. The problem with this is that you have to run regclean often, once you have changed the interface, because all those objects are poluting the registery. Creating an object in the local executable and in a foreign process is completely transparent, and so is communication between executables. You are usually not aware of this, until things go wrong due to syncronisation. I think VB6 is the language with the most closest COM intergration, but is a fact that is also unknown to most ordinary developers.
The nice thing about events in VB6 is that any variable that references an object that can generate event, automatically responds to these events when an event handling method has been
defined. This is a very simple and elegant mechanism, because it works automatically. In many other languages you have to do many things yourself.
No, actually at the time when they started developing this application, they did a very good analyses of all available technologies, and it turned out that VB was simply the most suitable development platform taking into account all factors. You appearantly haven't understood all the factors that are involved with developing software in a commercial environment, not some pet project where you can pick whatever you want.
In this case they are right to object. VB.Net is not the successor of VB6. VB.Net is simply C# with a different syntax. There is no smooth transition from VB6 to VB.Net. It is not a matter of learning a new syntax, it is a matter of having to a total new semantic. Companies that have invested 50 man year in the development of VB6 applications are now faced with the fact that they will require to trow in another 10 man year just to make the transition to VB.Net. It is simply the arrogancy of Microsoft here, I guess, that they think what is better for their customers than their customers do. It seems that only MS thinks that the.Net framework is a great success.
I a software engineer with a honor degree in computer science, I have come to the conclusion that VB6 has some unique features that are not found in other language, which allow the creation of professional applications in an industrial setting. Because objects in VB6 have a COM interface, VB6 can be used to implement inter process communication with great ease. Also the event mechanism in VB6 is rather unique in sense that I have not seen an implementation in another program language. It is a very powerfull program technique that seems not to be used by many people. It is indeed a fact that 99.9% of the people writing programs in VB do not touch on these features, but it would be utterly wrong to judge a language solemnly on how the "average" user is using it. I am afraid that VB6 is one of the most undervalued languages being used. I also understand that many of the nice features in VB6 are broken by the transition from VB6 to VB.Net.
Having read pages 1 and 6, I do not read anything beyond the introductionary level. It does not even seem to be rather C# specific for that matter. This is all stuff that people with a University degree in computer science should know by heart. The fact many of the readers rank it with a 9, says more about the readers than the quality of the page. People who do not understand the difference between a set and a list, should not even be allowed to be involved in any part of the development cycle of an arbitrary information system or computer application.
Of course, it is quite possible that in Massachusetts many more people have sexual relationships without being married, so in the end it may turn out that are actually more people staying with their initial partner in Texas then there are in Massachusetts. Here in the Netherlands there has been a time when it was not done to get married. You simply lived together. The law even came up with special rules for people who did not want to marry out of rebellion against the concept to marriage being a life long bond. Nowadays many people live together several years before they get married. So divorce rates being lower does not say a damn thing about the number of people that break up after having sexual relationship with someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it. For that reason, the disaster that was caused when the levees broke, was partly a human engineerd disaster, not a natural disaster. Of course, many government officials talk about it as a "natural disaster" to avoid them being blamed for it. To a large extend it politics played a large role than technology. In that case politics needs fixing!
A large part of the Netherlands is below sea level. Only a small part of Louisiana is below sea level. The danger of the dyks breaking was well known. I remember seeing a documentary about it on Discovery some years ago.
The Netherlands is not a Federal member of the EU, and seeing the outcome of the last vote with respect to the new consitution, it looks like it is going to take a long time before it will happen. And maybe you are giving us a good reason why we should stay an independent nation for a long time.
The problem in New Orleans is that local and national governments where aware of the risk, but decided to spend their money differently. It was a calculated risk that those dyks would break.
Yesterday, I heard on the news that some of the dyks around New Orleans where build to resist water levels that only occure once every thirty years. So really, it is no surprise that they did break now. Here in the Netherlands, dyks are build to resist water levels that only occure once every tenthousand years. The only conclusion that I can draw from this, is that this disaster is not a natural disaster but a human engineerd disaster.
Beter in what sense. Yes, it gives very detailed information, but it requires a lot of clicking and thinking to get an idea of what kind of changes have been made to the text.
Yes, that is true, but it would still require you to go through a number of steps yourself and draw your own conclusion. And not for everyone this would be a trivial task to perform.
Wikipedia should introduce a "change indicator" that uses background colours to indicate which parts of the text of an article have been modified (deleted) in the past ten days.
In a specification oriented programming model, you specify the behaviour, not all the million little steps that are needed to perform it. A specification oriented programming model is independent of the underlying techniques, such a networking protocols and marshalling techniques. I think such a specification oriented programming model should be data oriented, meaning that data is the starting point, not an event driven GUI front-end, as it is now with most programming models.
This is very true, but there are few genealogist who are working according this principle, and even fewer software packages that are supporting this way of working. It seems that most programs are only about recording the conclusions of your research.
Even the GEDCOM format is not really designed according to these principles. A good genealogic program should start with describing documents and sources, and from this derive certain facts. Given a birth certificate and a marriage certificate which mentions a person with the same name and bithdate, does not imply that these absolutely are the same person, especially if they are from a large city, like New York. Yet, in most cases, you would make such an assumption. That means that every combination of "facts" should be recorded. And maybe a certainty factor should be added. If the person was born in a small village, the change that there are two persons with the same name and birthdate, is much less likely.
Why did they stop at 13.6Gyr? Why not run this simulation into the future? Looking at the pictures, it doens't look like a stable situation has been reached yet.
Quite unlikely if the 'Peak oil' is going to happen within a few years.
Please note that the last report is from May 16. That is four whole days ago. There are some images of three days ago. I guess they haven't made any substantial progress in the past days. To me it seems that they did go backwards a little, but there are also signs that some of the wheels are digging in. And they are still not out of the track. I wonder if they will ever manage to get out of them. It seems to me that the top layer of the sand was actually a little stronger than the stuff below it, and I wonder whether they will be able to get on top of it again. I guess that there is still a substantial chance that Opportunity will not get out, and that this is going to be the resting place of the rover. And mind you, that does not mean the end of science work. There is still much to learn from the daily remote sensing operations. And of course, they will make every attempt to get the rover moving again. Time is on their side.
Commercial companies are not interested in interoperability, because it only makes it easier for their customers to switch another vendor. And although these languages may look similar, it still doens not mean that it is only a matter of syntax. And as a commercial company, you are not going to change the exact semantics of your language in order to make it interoperatble with the language used by others, and let all your customers do the conversion (which is never as trivial as it seems). Microsoft tried to unify VB, C++ and Java in the .Net environment. And see what came from it.
To improve lubrication the rovers have been driving backwards a lot of times lately. I remember they started doing this when one of the front wheels of the Spirit rover started to show more friction. After driving in reverse the friction became less.
When electricity becomes expensive, the cost for producing solar cells (which use a lot of electricity) will rise like wise. Most people don't realize that solar cells are more like batteries than anything else. They need a huge amouth of energy to produce and then for a long periode will give a little amouth of energy back. Under ideal conditions, they will return about ten times more energy then is required to produce them. But then if you take into account the losses for storing that energy and converting it into something usefull, it might only be a factor two.
The funny thing is that at the moment it is the right time to invest in solar cells, because oil prices are still relatively low. Wait until they have gone up by a factor ten in the coming decades, and you might have saved some cheap energy for the future.
For some strange reason, it always happens that when a certain resource starts to become rare, we as people start to use it up faster as long as it is available, until there is a total collapse of the system. If you are only in your twenties, I guess it is quite likely you will die from poverty.
English is not my native language. (I checked the dictionary now.) I got a master degree and passed with distinction.
When developing a commercial application you often have no other choice than to select from the available tools if you want to finish your application before your competor does. And most often you are quit restricted in your choices, if you want to deliver fast and cheap. It is very difficult to look in the future, and often the people managing software development are not aware of the fact that every "short time" decision often has "long term" effects. The name software is very misleading, because over and over again reality proofs that "software" is much harder than "hardware". The hardware we have is completely different from the one that we had ten years ago. Everything has changed. It is relatively cheap to change hardware, even to change hardware interfaces, compared to the cost of changing software to another development platform.
In VB6 any class that is defined as public automatically has a COM interface. The problem with this is that you have to run regclean often, once you have changed the interface, because all those objects are poluting the registery. Creating an object in the local executable and in a foreign process is completely transparent, and so is communication between executables. You are usually not aware of this, until things go wrong due to syncronisation. I think VB6 is the language with the most closest COM intergration, but is a fact that is also unknown to most ordinary developers.
The nice thing about events in VB6 is that any variable that references an object that can generate event, automatically responds to these events when an event handling method has been defined. This is a very simple and elegant mechanism, because it works automatically. In many other languages you have to do many things yourself.
No, actually at the time when they started developing this application, they did a very good analyses of all available technologies, and it turned out that VB was simply the most suitable development platform taking into account all factors. You appearantly haven't understood all the factors that are involved with developing software in a commercial environment, not some pet project where you can pick whatever you want.
In this case they are right to object. VB.Net is not the successor of VB6. VB.Net is simply C# with a different syntax. There is no smooth transition from VB6 to VB.Net. It is not a matter of learning a new syntax, it is a matter of having to a total new semantic. Companies that have invested 50 man year in the development of VB6 applications are now faced with the fact that they will require to trow in another 10 man year just to make the transition to VB.Net. It is simply the arrogancy of Microsoft here, I guess, that they think what is better for their customers than their customers do. It seems that only MS thinks that the .Net framework is a great success.
I a software engineer with a honor degree in computer science, I have come to the conclusion that VB6 has some unique features that are not found in other language, which allow the creation of professional applications in an industrial setting. Because objects in VB6 have a COM interface, VB6 can be used to implement inter process communication with great ease. Also the event mechanism in VB6 is rather unique in sense that I have not seen an implementation in another program language. It is a very powerfull program technique that seems not to be used by many people. It is indeed a fact that 99.9% of the people writing programs in VB do not touch on these features, but it would be utterly wrong to judge a language solemnly on how the "average" user is using it. I am afraid that VB6 is one of the most undervalued languages being used. I also understand that many of the nice features in VB6 are broken by the transition from VB6 to VB.Net.
Having read pages 1 and 6, I do not read anything beyond the introductionary level. It does not even seem to be rather C# specific for that matter. This is all stuff that people with a University degree in computer science should know by heart. The fact many of the readers rank it with a 9, says more about the readers than the quality of the page. People who do not understand the difference between a set and a list, should not even be allowed to be involved in any part of the development cycle of an arbitrary information system or computer application.
Of course, it is quite possible that in Massachusetts many more people have sexual relationships without being married, so in the end it may turn out that are actually more people staying with their initial partner in Texas then there are in Massachusetts. Here in the Netherlands there has been a time when it was not done to get married. You simply lived together. The law even came up with special rules for people who did not want to marry out of rebellion against the concept to marriage being a life long bond. Nowadays many people live together several years before they get married. So divorce rates being lower does not say a damn thing about the number of people that break up after having sexual relationship with someone else.
I guess you are right. Probably they are going to use baseline interference instead to determine the position of the craft.