I think you are trying to waste everyone's time by arguing with people over how they use a word that has a pretty fuzzy definition which can pertain to formatting, ways of approaching problems, intangibles, or what kind of underwear you prefer. And you try to tell them to use a fuzzily defined word that could also apply many different aspects of how software is made in its place. And I think what "style" is supposed to mean in the two previous posts is more than obvious from their context and content.
I think you are confusing trying to make everyone use a very nondeterministic, flexible, and idiomatic medium of communication exactly the same way as you do with effectively refuting a point. It's natural language. You have to think to use it. Deal with it.
I am actually glad to hear that. . . I don't know enough about current physics to really make any sort of valid judgement on the theory. (I frequently get the feeling that I don't even understand the basic ideas behind relativity very well.) But the idea of dark matter always seemed to me to be rather fishy, sort of like the old crystal spheres that held the planets aloft. I mean, they're both explanations for physical phenomena that were unexplainable under the model for how the universe worked at the time they were created, and they are both these sort of hand-wavey firmaments that don't seem to be something we can see or touch, but that we know to be there because they happen to magically make everything work. And dark energy feels like another hasty band-aid on top of the whole mess, like epicycles. My intuition is to think that the last few times people found problems with the theory, it turned out that the fundamental model was wrong, not that we needed to fill the universe with more crap (crystal spheres, aether, thunder gods, what have you), and to think that maybe it isn't so silly to try and extrapolate that pattern.
Style is more than just formatting. When I work on smaller projects, I tend to get to the point where I can tell who wrote what code just by looking at it.
The big advantage I can see is being able to automatically provide supplementary information in all three - so your calendar can allow you to click on a link to fire an e-mail to a person with whom you are scheduled to meet, and you have one address book for both e-mail and other contact info (also linked from the calendar), etc.
That said, I work in a Mac shop and we get that already with Mail.app, iCal, and the Address Book, so you're right that it doesn't require tight integration. But folks like the idea of getting a bunch of things rolled into one because of a (sometimes unfounded) perception of greater simplicity. That, and I imagine it would be a bit harder in if you're dealing with three separate vendors providing that integration, and a single vendor would have good reason to sell one app instead of three separate ones.
Also, I really have no idea if Outlook provides those features; I have never used the thing.
So what you're saying is that you have to have the matter in the galaxy orbit (more or less) around a common axis, like in our solar system.
What would cause this to happen, instead of there being a bunch of randomly-oriented orbits?
(I suppose I am making the critical assumption that the distribution of matter immediately after the big bang was uniform, and I'm sure any cosmologist would be happy to smack me down over that, but I'll ask anyway.)
Possibly we might give law enforcement a little more benefit of the doubt and consider the possibility that they went ahead with the arrest under the assumption that, if he were conuterfeiting the bills, he might have chosen them because they are uncommon, and basically nobody knows them well enough to be able to easily recognize whether they are real or not?
Not that that makes what they did okay, they still should have inspected the bills themselves before making the arrest. I was always under the impression that the police were expected to arrest people based on evidence, not one random dope's wild accusations.
Just because something is working as designed doesn't mean it's working toward the welfare of the population.
From a purely capitalist perspective, a night at home with my family is practically useless. Much better for me to forget them and work late ($) and then drive ($) to a bar, get drunk ($$), go pick up a hooker ($$$), and start driving to a hotel, but hit another car on the way, killing the hooker ($$$), and putting a family of four in the emergency room ($$$$$$$), and a few of them in the ICU ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$). Instead of pushing a few bucks for dinner at home through the economy, I'd be increasing the U.S. economy's GDP by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The means of capitalism may be the least of a set of evils, but its core values and the culture it fosters are completely boneheaded. I'd rather be content, healthy, and self-actualizing than rich, thank you very much.
What makes sense is what solution is cheap and reliable.
On one hand, it should take much less juice to cool just a few boxen directly rather than keep an entire room cold enough to keep all those CPU cores cool as well.
On the other hand, high-performance cooling systems inside every box means a lot more points of failure.
On the other hand, if everything in your server room requires a working HVAC to function, you're in trouble if the HVAC goes out - while if the cooling system in one server goes out, you can just swap it with a backup server while you're waiting for repairs.
I'm sure there's a whole lot more pro/con that I could parrot if I had bothered to RTFA. . .
Re:Big surprise... feh
on
CherryOS On Hold
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Also interesting that they refused to make any sort of comment in the MacWorld article. I don't know the legal system well, but could this be a sign that they know they're in so deep that there's hardly a think they could say that couldn't be used against them in court?
Re:Cognitive Machines Group @ MIT Media Lab
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
One of the big hurdles I think is from the fact that we are trying to approximate a massively parallel architecture (the brain) on a _annoyingly_ serial machine (the computer).
If anything, isn't Buffy the exception that proves the rule? I heard that the movie was originally written to be a lot more like how the TV show was done, but the movie's producers forced the director to tone the camp level down so much that it just destroyed the whole thing. Plus, the whole thing just needs far more space than you really get with ninety minutes to two hours.
But otherwise, I agree. The movie was terrible, the TV show was one of the best ever.
Environmental cost would be hard to compare. . . the pollution you get from various enery sources can be drastically different (acid rain on one end, no salmon on the other), so an apples to apples comparison would be impossible.
Though personally, my instinct is to say that plugging your Prius in would be worse since most power comes from burning fossil fuels, and (in America, at least), the emissions controls on power plants are weaker than the ones on most passenger vehicles.
Movies that are made from books are never as good as the original. Books that are made from movies are never as good as the original. T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie. Movie spinoffs of TV shows are never as good as the TV show. Video games made from books, movies, or TV shows are LAME. Movies, books, and TV shows made from video games pretty much always suck.
It's not that one medium is better than another, it's that the stuff that works well in one medium doesn't necessarily work out so well in others. Certain things just won't work in some media - imagine trying to turn The Matrix into a book. Those fight scenes would be B-O-R-I-N-G.
Are we talking about the various media's comparative strengths in terms of their ability to pull you into their world and make you think, or their ability to whack your brain with a blunt object so you don't have to worry about it functioning for a while?
(Not to make a statement about what media are stronger than others. . . the popular crap is just as crappy in literature as it is in film, and I consider my favorite movies to be just as great as my favorite books.)
The second type are folks who are running $5 games they buy at Home Depot on their eMachine from Wal*Mart. Microsoft might lose these people as customers because they dropped 16 bit support in 64 bit Windows. Maybe they'll all go by Macs! Or, maybe they'll just re-install Windows Me.
Or maybe they don't have 64-bit CPUs in the first place. And even if they did, they wouldn't be shelling out a few hundred bucks for a new OS unless they had to.
I'm sure for some stuff where you assume no drivers are needed, this is the case, so your USB keys and external hard drives would still work.
But once you get to stuff that isn't incredibly standardized, like network cards and non-postscript printers, checking a hardware compatibility list would be key. Microsoft has no need to waste their time and money writing drivers for all sorts of random bits of hardware on this platform for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that general consumers who would most benefit from having Microsoft write all those drivers aren't going to be the big purchasers of 64-bit Windows. Even if you have an x86-64 CPU, why buy 64-bit Windows for your computer with 1 gig of RAM and no 64-bit apps?
Not only that, but I expect a lot of forthcoming OS X software will be Tiger-only once it takes hold. The new developer frameworks (I'm especially fond of Core Data) are just too good to pass up.
Put the requirements in a contract, have everyone sign it. Explain to the customer that if they wish to change these requirements, they are welcome to renegotiate the contract.
(If you do this, do your damnedest to not agree to a due date, of course. =D )
It worked at my school, though not a private network, just semi-segregated subnets - certain network resources were only available to computers on certain subnets. These secure subnets were all on fully-switched copper wire networks.
Sadly, there was still no mechanism in place to force faculty and staff (or students) to use something other than, say, their university ID number as their password.
Oh, you can crash OS X. The easiest way I have found to do it is to daisy-chain about four FireWire drives out one port and three out the other (don't ask), get some good strong disk activity going on all seven of them, let that run for a couple of minutes, then plug an eighth into the whole mess.
Once you've done this, wait for a minute or so. . . if the new drive's icon appears, it didn't work - try again. If it hasn't appeared yet, you'll notice the Finder has probably become unresponsive, and every other program will start to hang, too. This is a Good Thing. The fireworks are coming. Wait another half hour or so, and you should be rewarded with a kernel panic screen. Sit back and appreciate that even as dire a message as this is provided to you in beautiful anti-aliased text, and comes in four different languages. Feel a twinge of sorrow for your poor Linux using comrades, whose OS can't even manage to articulate this message in something that even looks like a language.
(normally, it doesn't happen this way. Normally, I hold the power button for a while.)
7) Turn three feet to the right, mount the network shares on my Linux workstation, and continue working away happily, all while secretly praying that god damned XP workstation never ever comes back to life. Helpfully point out to boss that Crossover Office is cheaper than a hard drive.
Besides why the heck are you worried about the DS?
I, for one, am not.
The moment I heard about the DS and the way the touchscreen would be used (Metroid, anyone?), I decided that it is doomed (or designed, if you ask me) to be a short-lived gimmick system, like the Virtual Boy or the 32X. Trying out the demo system in stores confirmed that for me.
No matter what way you cut it, the Game Boy DS is _not_ Nintendo's next-gen handheld, whether Nintendo wants it to be or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are trying to waste everyone's time by arguing with people over how they use a word that has a pretty fuzzy definition which can pertain to formatting, ways of approaching problems, intangibles, or what kind of underwear you prefer. And you try to tell them to use a fuzzily defined word that could also apply many different aspects of how software is made in its place. And I think what "style" is supposed to mean in the two previous posts is more than obvious from their context and content.
I think you are confusing trying to make everyone use a very nondeterministic, flexible, and idiomatic medium of communication exactly the same way as you do with effectively refuting a point. It's natural language. You have to think to use it. Deal with it.
I am actually glad to hear that. . . I don't know enough about current physics to really make any sort of valid judgement on the theory. (I frequently get the feeling that I don't even understand the basic ideas behind relativity very well.) But the idea of dark matter always seemed to me to be rather fishy, sort of like the old crystal spheres that held the planets aloft.
I mean, they're both explanations for physical phenomena that were unexplainable under the model for how the universe worked at the time they were created, and they are both these sort of hand-wavey firmaments that don't seem to be something we can see or touch, but that we know to be there because they happen to magically make everything work. And dark energy feels like another hasty band-aid on top of the whole mess, like epicycles. My intuition is to think that the last few times people found problems with the theory, it turned out that the fundamental model was wrong, not that we needed to fill the universe with more crap (crystal spheres, aether, thunder gods, what have you), and to think that maybe it isn't so silly to try and extrapolate that pattern.
Style is more than just formatting. When I work on smaller projects, I tend to get to the point where I can tell who wrote what code just by looking at it.
The big advantage I can see is being able to automatically provide supplementary information in all three - so your calendar can allow you to click on a link to fire an e-mail to a person with whom you are scheduled to meet, and you have one address book for both e-mail and other contact info (also linked from the calendar), etc.
That said, I work in a Mac shop and we get that already with Mail.app, iCal, and the Address Book, so you're right that it doesn't require tight integration. But folks like the idea of getting a bunch of things rolled into one because of a (sometimes unfounded) perception of greater simplicity. That, and I imagine it would be a bit harder in if you're dealing with three separate vendors providing that integration, and a single vendor would have good reason to sell one app instead of three separate ones.
Also, I really have no idea if Outlook provides those features; I have never used the thing.
So what you're saying is that you have to have the matter in the galaxy orbit (more or less) around a common axis, like in our solar system.
What would cause this to happen, instead of there being a bunch of randomly-oriented orbits?
(I suppose I am making the critical assumption that the distribution of matter immediately after the big bang was uniform, and I'm sure any cosmologist would be happy to smack me down over that, but I'll ask anyway.)
The $2 bill was discontinued before the security bar was introduced.
Possibly we might give law enforcement a little more benefit of the doubt and consider the possibility that they went ahead with the arrest under the assumption that, if he were conuterfeiting the bills, he might have chosen them because they are uncommon, and basically nobody knows them well enough to be able to easily recognize whether they are real or not?
Not that that makes what they did okay, they still should have inspected the bills themselves before making the arrest. I was always under the impression that the police were expected to arrest people based on evidence, not one random dope's wild accusations.
Just because something is working as designed doesn't mean it's working toward the welfare of the population.
From a purely capitalist perspective, a night at home with my family is practically useless. Much better for me to forget them and work late ($) and then drive ($) to a bar, get drunk ($$), go pick up a hooker ($$$), and start driving to a hotel, but hit another car on the way, killing the hooker ($$$), and putting a family of four in the emergency room ($$$$$$$), and a few of them in the ICU ($$$$$$$$$$$$$$). Instead of pushing a few bucks for dinner at home through the economy, I'd be increasing the U.S. economy's GDP by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The means of capitalism may be the least of a set of evils, but its core values and the culture it fosters are completely boneheaded. I'd rather be content, healthy, and self-actualizing than rich, thank you very much.
What makes sense is what solution is cheap and reliable.
On one hand, it should take much less juice to cool just a few boxen directly rather than keep an entire room cold enough to keep all those CPU cores cool as well.
On the other hand, high-performance cooling systems inside every box means a lot more points of failure.
On the other hand, if everything in your server room requires a working HVAC to function, you're in trouble if the HVAC goes out - while if the cooling system in one server goes out, you can just swap it with a backup server while you're waiting for repairs.
I'm sure there's a whole lot more pro/con that I could parrot if I had bothered to RTFA. . .
Also interesting that they refused to make any sort of comment in the MacWorld article. I don't know the legal system well, but could this be a sign that they know they're in so deep that there's hardly a think they could say that couldn't be used against them in court?
One of the big hurdles I think is from the fact that we are trying to approximate a massively parallel architecture (the brain) on a _annoyingly_ serial machine (the computer).
Maybe a Beowulf cluster of those would help?
--ducks--
If anything, isn't Buffy the exception that proves the rule? I heard that the movie was originally written to be a lot more like how the TV show was done, but the movie's producers forced the director to tone the camp level down so much that it just destroyed the whole thing. Plus, the whole thing just needs far more space than you really get with ninety minutes to two hours.
But otherwise, I agree. The movie was terrible, the TV show was one of the best ever.
Environmental cost would be hard to compare. . . the pollution you get from various enery sources can be drastically different (acid rain on one end, no salmon on the other), so an apples to apples comparison would be impossible.
Though personally, my instinct is to say that plugging your Prius in would be worse since most power comes from burning fossil fuels, and (in America, at least), the emissions controls on power plants are weaker than the ones on most passenger vehicles.
Movies that are made from books are never as good as the original.
Books that are made from movies are never as good as the original.
T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie.
Movie spinoffs of TV shows are never as good as the TV show.
Video games made from books, movies, or TV shows are LAME.
Movies, books, and TV shows made from video games pretty much always suck.
It's not that one medium is better than another, it's that the stuff that works well in one medium doesn't necessarily work out so well in others. Certain things just won't work in some media - imagine trying to turn The Matrix into a book. Those fight scenes would be B-O-R-I-N-G.
Are we talking about the various media's comparative strengths in terms of their ability to pull you into their world and make you think, or their ability to whack your brain with a blunt object so you don't have to worry about it functioning for a while?
(Not to make a statement about what media are stronger than others. . . the popular crap is just as crappy in literature as it is in film, and I consider my favorite movies to be just as great as my favorite books.)
Is it just me, or is there a certain delicious irony in the words "No Logo" being a link to Amazon.com in the parent post?
The second type are folks who are running $5 games they buy at Home Depot on their eMachine from Wal*Mart. Microsoft might lose these people as customers because they dropped 16 bit support in 64 bit Windows. Maybe they'll all go by Macs! Or, maybe they'll just re-install Windows Me.
Or maybe they don't have 64-bit CPUs in the first place. And even if they did, they wouldn't be shelling out a few hundred bucks for a new OS unless they had to.
I'm sure for some stuff where you assume no drivers are needed, this is the case, so your USB keys and external hard drives would still work.
But once you get to stuff that isn't incredibly standardized, like network cards and non-postscript printers, checking a hardware compatibility list would be key. Microsoft has no need to waste their time and money writing drivers for all sorts of random bits of hardware on this platform for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that general consumers who would most benefit from having Microsoft write all those drivers aren't going to be the big purchasers of 64-bit Windows.
Even if you have an x86-64 CPU, why buy 64-bit Windows for your computer with 1 gig of RAM and no 64-bit apps?
Not only that, but I expect a lot of forthcoming OS X software will be Tiger-only once it takes hold. The new developer frameworks (I'm especially fond of Core Data) are just too good to pass up.
I have my own Heisenburg's Law of Software Delivery - You cannot be sure of both the delivery date and the feature set of the final product.
Put the requirements in a contract, have everyone sign it. Explain to the customer that if they wish to change these requirements, they are welcome to renegotiate the contract.
(If you do this, do your damnedest to not agree to a due date, of course. =D )
It worked at my school, though not a private network, just semi-segregated subnets - certain network resources were only available to computers on certain subnets. These secure subnets were all on fully-switched copper wire networks.
Sadly, there was still no mechanism in place to force faculty and staff (or students) to use something other than, say, their university ID number as their password.
Oh, you can crash OS X. The easiest way I have found to do it is to daisy-chain about four FireWire drives out one port and three out the other (don't ask), get some good strong disk activity going on all seven of them, let that run for a couple of minutes, then plug an eighth into the whole mess.
Once you've done this, wait for a minute or so. . . if the new drive's icon appears, it didn't work - try again. If it hasn't appeared yet, you'll notice the Finder has probably become unresponsive, and every other program will start to hang, too. This is a Good Thing. The fireworks are coming. Wait another half hour or so, and you should be rewarded with a kernel panic screen. Sit back and appreciate that even as dire a message as this is provided to you in beautiful anti-aliased text, and comes in four different languages. Feel a twinge of sorrow for your poor Linux using comrades, whose OS can't even manage to articulate this message in something that even looks like a language.
(normally, it doesn't happen this way. Normally, I hold the power button for a while.)
7) Turn three feet to the right, mount the network shares on my Linux workstation, and continue working away happily, all while secretly praying that god damned XP workstation never ever comes back to life. Helpfully point out to boss that Crossover Office is cheaper than a hard drive.
Besides why the heck are you worried about the DS?
I, for one, am not.
The moment I heard about the DS and the way the touchscreen would be used (Metroid, anyone?), I decided that it is doomed (or designed, if you ask me) to be a short-lived gimmick system, like the Virtual Boy or the 32X. Trying out the demo system in stores confirmed that for me.
No matter what way you cut it, the Game Boy DS is _not_ Nintendo's next-gen handheld, whether Nintendo wants it to be or not.