There's nothing more annoying to "Europeans" than by labeling them all "Europeans". I learnt that the hard way by a very irate French woman and German man a year ago. "Europe" is not a country, the article doesn't say "seven from North America", does it?
Well, I'm European. I would continue, but that says it all really, doesn't it?
I work in a fairly small office with people from the UK, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Italy. I suppose that working in an international environment has colored my perceptions, so I think of myself as "European" first, but if I could get a passport that simply said "Europe" I would do it.
And it's not that there is anything wrong with the country I was born in (and still live in); I feel at home, I feel the culture is mine, but I also feel part of something greater, which is the European Union. Unlike many I think it is a worthwhile experiment, and I hope it will continue and prosper.
Finally, scaling back consumption "a little" in the US would obviously have to decrease the US standard of living "a little" at the very least. Certainly there is waste, but it takes effort to eliminate waste.
That's "obviously" bullshit. Simple to prove: let's say you go to the gasstation _right now_, buy a jerrycan of fuel, and then throw it in the nearest canal.
You have now increased your energy use, but you have certainly not increased your standard of living (no, really, you haven't). Similarly, there are plenty of opportunities for scaling down your energy use without decreasing your standard of living. Turn off devices you don't use, for example. Having to wait those few seconds before your TV returns to life (about five seconds on mine, and it is an old model) really won't hurt your standard of living but would save a significant amount of energy.
Or install floor-heating in your house. That both decreases your energy use and increases your standard of living! There's plenty of stuff you can do that won't hurt at all.
Unless of course you feel that using energy is a goal by itself, which I sometimes suspect is how some americans see things...
In other worse, nuclear power is still the best solution until we can significantly improve the efficiency of generating solar power and wind power.
The word "best" is not solely defined by price. When you buy a new car, do you always get the cheapest pile of shit you can get your hands on? Or do you look for something with a certain range, speed, capacity, and maintainability, in addition to it being in your budget?
We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration. When a faction in the Sierra Club tried to address that issue, the members of that faction were accused of being "racist".
Sending all the immigrants back just moves the problem of energy generation to another place in the world - but it will still be there, and the ecosystem is a global one.
Of course, americans use more energy per head of the population than everybody else. Scaling that back a little would be trivial, and wouldn't have any impact on your quality of life.
My question is if they are removing the blue E icon or actually removing the rendering engine? My guess is the former. The way things stand, I imagine many apps would be impossible to run without the rendering engine. A simple test would be to open a file browser and then type in a URL to see if an internet web page can be shown. If it's there, you will see it that way.
Who cares if the rendering engine is still there? The *browser*, the thing that Microsoft uses to leverage one illegal monopoly into another, is gone, and that's what counts. The rendering engine can sit amidst the countless gigabytes of crap that is already there, and serve local help pages, steam, and other crap, and it really doesn't matter at all.
Arguably this fight is over anyway. Microsoft has already lost the leveraging power it had in that space.
The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement
So, extrapolating from those two points, we just need a big, old-fashioned war. (hot or cold, as desired)
Just to keep the noise down on the other continents, could you maybe make it a civil war this time? Or maybe something with Canada and/or Mexico... Thanks!
Not to be too flippant, but what about renting a boat?
I suppose it is a possibility, but even on the beach I can read a newspaper at night simply because nearby Amsterdam, Schiphol, and other areas produce so much light. You would have to go out a significant distance to make any difference, and the idea of being on a (presumably small) boat with no lights in the middle of the sea, with lots of bigger ships all around, scares me.
A) Is this 1/5th immobile? Can they not hop a commuter train to the suburbs or something? I'd really like to know.
Ok, first take a look here. Now look carefully on the western edge of Europe, in the country of the Netherlands. See that extremely bright spot stretching along the cost? I live right in the middle of that. Now look around that: everything is equally bright. The nearest darkish spots are to the south, in France, about 350km away.
Let's say I go to France, then. The train to Paris will take me there in about four hours, but I don't want to go to Paris, I want to head out into the dark spots. Have you ever noticed a train stopping in total darkness, in the absolute middle of nowhere-without-a-light? Right, neither have I. They stop in places with high enough population density to make a train stop useful. Those places typically have lots of light as well. So even if I were to make the additional train ride to get to an area that is at least semi-dark, I would still need to get out of the city I'm in and into the countryside to have any benefit.
I hope this explains to you why I have seen the milky way precisely _once_ in my entire life... And it was an unforgettable sight.
I know that when I go out to see Dad in Wyoming the difference is absolutely noticeable, but I've always assumed that the same could be gained by finding some road-side location out in 'the sticks'.
I'll skip the obvious joke about your dad, but for some of us "the sticks" is two countries to the south...
B) When is light 'pollution', and are we okay with (what I assume is) a situational definition of that word? Is light 'pollution' when it comes out of your headlights? Or only when Wal-Mart uses it to light their parking lot? Is there some measurable standard of 'enough' light, and the excess is 'pollution'? Or is it only 'pollution' when you want it to be dark? I'd honestly like to know...
I don't know about the precise word "pollution", but it is certainly undesirable when it deprives us of something of awesome natural beauty - even if it serves some purpose in our industrial society.
C) What does 'the arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage' mean, exactly? Are we really weighing the advantages of light at night against 'natural heritage'? Because, from where I sit, 'living in a cave, eating only what you can kill with a pointy stick' is also our 'natural heritage'. The rest is technology at work, for better or worse.
It just strikes me as weird, and I'd love to hear voices from the other side of it.
What purpose does the grand canyon serve? Why not just make it the largest landfill in the world? What purpose does yellowstone serve? Why not build a city there so people can use the geisers for natural heating? What purpose does the arctic wildlife reserve serve? Why not dig the whole thing up and draw out every last drop of oil?
The sky is no different from that - even if you've never seen it with your own eyes.
Not trying to troll or anything, but I'd always hear of how parallel programming is very complicated for programmers, but then I learnt to use pthread in C to parallelise everything in my C program from parallel concurrent processing of the same things to threading any aspect of the program, and I was surprised by how simple and straightforward it was using pthread, even creating a number of threads depending on the number of detected cores was simple.
Really? With the pthread API? Pray tell, how does that work?
Note that reading from/proc/ is neither part of the pthread API, nor portable...
Freeze and play dead? Someone really should have thought of that _before_ we started broadcasting radio and TV and a planet-wide basis. Those waves really don't stop when they hit the outer atmosphere you know... By now we should be fairly well-known in our galactic neighbourhood.
As for talking about our guns, whoever shows up here has already demonstrated massively superior technology to ours (we are not showing up on _their_ doorstep are we?) so antagonizing them might not be such a great idea either.
So yeah, by all means let's throw a party and hope it isn't us that ends up on the barbecue...
Throughout the entire NIF facility, emergency shutdown panels listing the status of the laser (using both text and light) provide a level of safety for the hapless scientist or technician who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time before a firing of the lasers.
Well, I think I speak for everyone here when I say that it was thoughtful of them to provide a warning light before they turn it on...;-)
I also hope they have a webcam, especially in that room with the giant tubes (lasers). When the portal storm finally starts I'd like to see those cool lasers ripping through walls, headcrabs, and hapless scientists before I'm turned into a zombie myself;-)
> Thank you for disproving the article entirely on your own.
You're welcome. You mean there was an article? I didn't bother reading it.
Did I miss much?:)
Not really. Reading back, I see my posting reads a bit like a personal attack on you, but that really wasn't the intention and I apologize if it was perceived that way. I just get riled up at the whole "software engineers are not real engineers" thing; structural engineers are not infallible either.
Software projects do fail, at a rate that is too high, but in my opinion that is not caused by lacking engineering discipline but rather by ridiculously low deadlines and cowboy operators (even if they are wearing three piece suits). What we can learn from other engineering disciplines is that we need to get ourselves certified and get that certification protected by governments - not for the skill or rigorousness it demonstrates, but simply because it allows us to wield power against managers ("no, I will _not_ sign off on that; it is not ready").
I doubt real engineers would use a completely unreliable piece of software.
The point of this article was that software engineers are not real engineers because they lack rigorous frameworks and rely too much on human factors. Seen from that point of view, you really only have two classes of software: those that are rigorously engineered to be reliable (and the article already claimed those don't exist), and those that are not. The last group must therefore comprise all software that's out there.
Real engineers are practical enough to use software works well enough. They're not mathematicians who keep looking for complete proofs, or 100% - they are well aware of the real world.
Fine, no problems with that. But "real engineers" should then also accept software engineers as real engineers. Software engineers are also practical enough to make software that works well enough - even though software engineers are not mathematicians who keep looking for complete proofs.
And in the real world, it will be exceedingly unlikely that the finite element analysis software will work fine for lots of different cases, but fail dangerously for your case even though it is not really very different to other common cases.
"We tried walking across it a few times and it stayed up, so it is probably fine" - Yeah, that sounds pretty rigorous to me...
If the case is something really new and "far out", I bet a proper engineer would do more checks and perhaps add higher safety margins.
Again, where is that rigorousness of which the article speaks? What you are proposing is just a matter of intuition, without any grounding mathematical framework.
The other thing is, an experienced engineer will often know whether something is dangerous. It's just like you looking at a branch and guessing whether it will hold your weight or not. If a branch is way too weak it's easy to guess that.
And an experienced software engineer won't know?
Similarly if the software gives a result that's ridiculous an experienced engineer should notice it.
And an experienced software engineer won't notice?
It's more likely that the contractor botches up the job (or cheats) and doesn't build according to the required quality and spec - e.g. use more sand in the concrete to save cost, use less concrete, etc.
...and we're back to human factors. Thank you for disproving the article entirely on your own.
I'm not sure if I want to reply to AC's, but I forgot to mention I'm a structural engineer myself by education... Most structures of respectable size fall back on Finite Element Analysis to gauge the response to a variety of loads. [The estimation of loads is a research topic in itself, where the factors of safety comes from a rigorous stochastic-based reliability analysis].
Once analysis has been performed, design is a bit of intuition, but certainly not estimation - it's more of heuristics... so you say, "this worked last time, let me try this option and analyse if it'll work this time too."
So... A "real" engineer uses heuristics, common sense, estimation, and best of all, a complete unreliable piece of _software_ that was written by a programmer (who we just established can never be an engineer since they cannot be rigorous) to rigorously analyse his work? Looks to me like you are building your bridge on rather shaky grounds there, if you'll forgive the metaphore...
In the meantime, I found myself wondering how maintenance works for real structures. Apparently you _can_ rule out the human factor there completely, making "real" engineering thereby far more rigorous? Don't forget that "maintenance" means something very different for software than it does for real structures: you don't have to paint your software once every two years... What we call maintenance really is "changing the structure that is already there to become something else". I'd like to see someone add a lane or two to an existing bridge without involving humans at some point as a fundamental factor.
Look at that fourth screenshot. What possible harm could loading a project do, I wonder? Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment? Is this an attempt to banish evil compilers from accidentally compiling source?
And why is the answer always "make the user choose" even though there is absolutely no way to make an informed choice (same problem as with UAC or sudo: I don't want to hand over the keys to the kingdom, I only want to give out narrow and specific permissions, based on useful information, rather than some nebulous feeling of 'trust')?
I must be getting older because I just don't get too excited about "new" games. I wonder if I am leveling up in my Geekdom. I find myself caring less and less about video games and movies, and more and more about getting network jacks in every room in the house and getting all my DVDs ripped to a SAN so I stream them to the media room.
That's ok. It happens when you get older, and it is called "getting a life". One of these days you may even experience something called "sex". It almost beats ripping your DVD's to a SAN so you can stream them off your jacks in every room in your house...
Portability is nice, but I was referring to the fact that it is actually a standards-compliant, full-featured compiler. I have struggled with too many compilers that may produce great code, but *only* if you speak their local dialect. Which is a major pain if you try to produce portable code.
Example: ACC on HPUX. Don't get me wrong, I love it, and its error messages are in a class all on their own. But the standard clearly allows comma's in places where ACC throws an error. Sure, it's just a minor thing, but still...
Please provide me one example of a free/OSS platform implementation of a commercial product that is inarguable BETTER than the original proprietary version. OpenJDK > Sun (Sun wins). DirectX > OpenGL (MS wins)..Net > Mono.
OpenGL is not an open source product. But I'd argue that gcc is miles better than whatever crappy C compiler it originally replaced.
One idea, based on what I have seen work abroad, is to mandate, for a limited time, a fee of $1 on all Internet connections. You could then use that monthly credit to subscribe to whatever content you chose.
$1 for newspapers... $30 for the RIAA... Another $30 for the MPAA... $20 for game makers... $40 for professional software makers... $15 for TV makers... $10 for documentary makers... $3.50 for book authors...
I'm all in favor of having a small linkable SVG library! I've been looking for something like that for a while, but haven't found anything acceptable for my needs. So instead of displaying the SVG's directly I prerender to PNG and show that instead. That makes the icons the only part of the user interface that don't scale.
I've considered ripping the rendering engine out of Inkscape and building a standalone library out of that. Problem is, it is a lot of work for a cosmetic gain...
Depends. What were you using when making that comment?
Anyway, why doesn't the article compare to XP as well? I'm sure 7 is beter than Vista, but we all agreed that Vista was crappy anyway. Will I see any benefit moving from XP though?
You couldnt be more wrong. There are still photographers who use film because they are snobbish elitists who feels it elevates them far above the unwashed masses with their convenient digital cameras
There, fixed that for you. But feel free to continu using film, you are not bothering me in the least...
Megapixels dont mean anything. You can have large number of megapixels in a point and shoot, but it still doesnt come near a pro-amerature / pro SLR as far as quality.
Yeah, yeah, we all know that by now. Bit of a straw man really. I don't think I actually know anyone who cares about megapixels. Things they do care about: size of the camera and convenience of the interface, and on the other side of the spectrum, quality of the lens and quality of the result.
I learned more about photography shooting film than I did with a digital.
Funny: I learned far more shooting digital than I ever did with film. With film I made the occasional picture when I was on holiday, only seeing the results three weeks later after I came back and had them developed. The link between how I used the camera and what results I got was totally non-existent because I would have forgotten about that stuff by the time I was looking at my crappy pictures.
And now? I take my digital (four megapixel) camera with me almost every weekend, I make multiple shots of anything I think is worth shooting, and since I get immediate feedback I have learned a great deal about how to properly use the camera and how to make great shots. I regularly produce high-quality pictures now (good framing, good light, good choice of subject matter).
And that's the crux of the matter, of course: the digital camera has allowed me to learn enough to approach the level of professional photographers, something that was previously only possible if you seriously dedicated yourself to it. I understand why that bothers people such as you, but you really shouldn't blame the tools...
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing more annoying to "Europeans" than by labeling them all "Europeans". I learnt that the hard way by a very irate French woman and German man a year ago. "Europe" is not a country, the article doesn't say "seven from North America", does it?
Well, I'm European. I would continue, but that says it all really, doesn't it?
I work in a fairly small office with people from the UK, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Italy. I suppose that working in an international environment has colored my perceptions, so I think of myself as "European" first, but if I could get a passport that simply said "Europe" I would do it.
And it's not that there is anything wrong with the country I was born in (and still live in); I feel at home, I feel the culture is mine, but I also feel part of something greater, which is the European Union. Unlike many I think it is a worthwhile experiment, and I hope it will continue and prosper.
Finally, scaling back consumption "a little" in the US would obviously have to decrease the US standard of living "a little" at the very least. Certainly there is waste, but it takes effort to eliminate waste.
That's "obviously" bullshit. Simple to prove: let's say you go to the gasstation _right now_, buy a jerrycan of fuel, and then throw it in the nearest canal.
You have now increased your energy use, but you have certainly not increased your standard of living (no, really, you haven't). Similarly, there are plenty of opportunities for scaling down your energy use without decreasing your standard of living. Turn off devices you don't use, for example. Having to wait those few seconds before your TV returns to life (about five seconds on mine, and it is an old model) really won't hurt your standard of living but would save a significant amount of energy.
Or install floor-heating in your house. That both decreases your energy use and increases your standard of living! There's plenty of stuff you can do that won't hurt at all.
Unless of course you feel that using energy is a goal by itself, which I sometimes suspect is how some americans see things...
In other worse, nuclear power is still the best solution until we can significantly improve the efficiency of generating solar power and wind power.
The word "best" is not solely defined by price. When you buy a new car, do you always get the cheapest pile of shit you can get your hands on? Or do you look for something with a certain range, speed, capacity, and maintainability, in addition to it being in your budget?
We should also address the major reason for the growing demand for energy. That reason is overpopulation. However, no American politician has the guts to touch that topic. It is too closely tied to illegal immigration. When a faction in the Sierra Club tried to address that issue, the members of that faction were accused of being "racist".
Sending all the immigrants back just moves the problem of energy generation to another place in the world - but it will still be there, and the ecosystem is a global one.
Of course, americans use more energy per head of the population than everybody else. Scaling that back a little would be trivial, and wouldn't have any impact on your quality of life.
My question is if they are removing the blue E icon or actually removing the rendering engine? My guess is the former. The way things stand, I imagine many apps would be impossible to run without the rendering engine. A simple test would be to open a file browser and then type in a URL to see if an internet web page can be shown. If it's there, you will see it that way.
Who cares if the rendering engine is still there? The *browser*, the thing that Microsoft uses to leverage one illegal monopoly into another, is gone, and that's what counts. The rendering engine can sit amidst the countless gigabytes of crap that is already there, and serve local help pages, steam, and other crap, and it really doesn't matter at all.
Arguably this fight is over anyway. Microsoft has already lost the leveraging power it had in that space.
The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement
So, extrapolating from those two points, we just need a big, old-fashioned war. (hot or cold, as desired)
Just to keep the noise down on the other continents, could you maybe make it a civil war this time? Or maybe something with Canada and/or Mexico... Thanks!
Me too. I'm also in CA and it is not curently happening.
Are you saying this is currently not happening?
Not to be too flippant, but what about renting a boat?
I suppose it is a possibility, but even on the beach I can read a newspaper at night simply because nearby Amsterdam, Schiphol, and other areas produce so much light. You would have to go out a significant distance to make any difference, and the idea of being on a (presumably small) boat with no lights in the middle of the sea, with lots of bigger ships all around, scares me.
I take issue with a number of things here...
A) Is this 1/5th immobile? Can they not hop a commuter train to the suburbs or something?
I'd really like to know.
Ok, first take a look here. Now look carefully on the western edge of Europe, in the country of the Netherlands. See that extremely bright spot stretching along the cost? I live right in the middle of that. Now look around that: everything is equally bright. The nearest darkish spots are to the south, in France, about 350km away.
Let's say I go to France, then. The train to Paris will take me there in about four hours, but I don't want to go to Paris, I want to head out into the dark spots. Have you ever noticed a train stopping in total darkness, in the absolute middle of nowhere-without-a-light? Right, neither have I. They stop in places with high enough population density to make a train stop useful. Those places typically have lots of light as well. So even if I were to make the additional train ride to get to an area that is at least semi-dark, I would still need to get out of the city I'm in and into the countryside to have any benefit.
I hope this explains to you why I have seen the milky way precisely _once_ in my entire life... And it was an unforgettable sight.
I know that when I go out to see Dad in Wyoming the difference is absolutely noticeable, but I've always assumed that the same could be gained by finding some road-side location out in 'the sticks'.
I'll skip the obvious joke about your dad, but for some of us "the sticks" is two countries to the south...
B) When is light 'pollution', and are we okay with (what I assume is) a situational definition of that word? Is light 'pollution' when it comes out of your headlights? Or only when Wal-Mart uses it to light their parking lot? Is there some measurable standard of 'enough' light, and the excess is 'pollution'? Or is it only 'pollution' when you want it to be dark? I'd honestly like to know...
I don't know about the precise word "pollution", but it is certainly undesirable when it deprives us of something of awesome natural beauty - even if it serves some purpose in our industrial society.
C) What does 'the arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage' mean, exactly? Are we really weighing the advantages of light at night against 'natural heritage'? Because, from where I sit, 'living in a cave, eating only what you can kill with a pointy stick' is also our 'natural heritage'. The rest is technology at work, for better or worse.
It just strikes me as weird, and I'd love to hear voices from the other side of it.
What purpose does the grand canyon serve? Why not just make it the largest landfill in the world? What purpose does yellowstone serve? Why not build a city there so people can use the geisers for natural heating? What purpose does the arctic wildlife reserve serve? Why not dig the whole thing up and draw out every last drop of oil?
The sky is no different from that - even if you've never seen it with your own eyes.
Ah, thanks, that is useful to know. Certainly a lot more useful than "just make it system dependent" like the original poster apparently did...
Not trying to troll or anything, but I'd always hear of how parallel programming is very complicated for programmers, but then I learnt to use pthread in C to parallelise everything in my C program from parallel concurrent processing of the same things to threading any aspect of the program, and I was surprised by how simple and straightforward it was using pthread, even creating a number of threads depending on the number of detected cores was simple.
Really? With the pthread API? Pray tell, how does that work?
Note that reading from /proc/ is neither part of the pthread API, nor portable...
Freeze and play dead? Someone really should have thought of that _before_ we started broadcasting radio and TV and a planet-wide basis. Those waves really don't stop when they hit the outer atmosphere you know... By now we should be fairly well-known in our galactic neighbourhood.
As for talking about our guns, whoever shows up here has already demonstrated massively superior technology to ours (we are not showing up on _their_ doorstep are we?) so antagonizing them might not be such a great idea either.
So yeah, by all means let's throw a party and hope it isn't us that ends up on the barbecue...
Throughout the entire NIF facility, emergency shutdown panels listing the status of the laser (using both text and light) provide a level of safety for the hapless scientist or technician who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time before a firing of the lasers.
Well, I think I speak for everyone here when I say that it was thoughtful of them to provide a warning light before they turn it on... ;-)
I also hope they have a webcam, especially in that room with the giant tubes (lasers). When the portal storm finally starts I'd like to see those cool lasers ripping through walls, headcrabs, and hapless scientists before I'm turned into a zombie myself ;-)
> Thank you for disproving the article entirely on your own.
You're welcome. You mean there was an article? I didn't bother reading it.
Did I miss much? :)
Not really. Reading back, I see my posting reads a bit like a personal attack on you, but that really wasn't the intention and I apologize if it was perceived that way. I just get riled up at the whole "software engineers are not real engineers" thing; structural engineers are not infallible either.
Software projects do fail, at a rate that is too high, but in my opinion that is not caused by lacking engineering discipline but rather by ridiculously low deadlines and cowboy operators (even if they are wearing three piece suits). What we can learn from other engineering disciplines is that we need to get ourselves certified and get that certification protected by governments - not for the skill or rigorousness it demonstrates, but simply because it allows us to wield power against managers ("no, I will _not_ sign off on that; it is not ready").
"completely unreliable piece of _software_"
I doubt real engineers would use a completely unreliable piece of software.
The point of this article was that software engineers are not real engineers because they lack rigorous frameworks and rely too much on human factors. Seen from that point of view, you really only have two classes of software: those that are rigorously engineered to be reliable (and the article already claimed those don't exist), and those that are not. The last group must therefore comprise all software that's out there.
Real engineers are practical enough to use software works well enough. They're not mathematicians who keep looking for complete proofs, or 100% - they are well aware of the real world.
Fine, no problems with that. But "real engineers" should then also accept software engineers as real engineers. Software engineers are also practical enough to make software that works well enough - even though software engineers are not mathematicians who keep looking for complete proofs.
And in the real world, it will be exceedingly unlikely that the finite element analysis software will work fine for lots of different cases, but fail dangerously for your case even though it is not really very different to other common cases.
"We tried walking across it a few times and it stayed up, so it is probably fine" - Yeah, that sounds pretty rigorous to me...
If the case is something really new and "far out", I bet a proper engineer would do more checks and perhaps add higher safety margins.
Again, where is that rigorousness of which the article speaks? What you are proposing is just a matter of intuition, without any grounding mathematical framework.
The other thing is, an experienced engineer will often know whether something is dangerous. It's just like you looking at a branch and guessing whether it will hold your weight or not. If a branch is way too weak it's easy to guess that.
And an experienced software engineer won't know?
Similarly if the software gives a result that's ridiculous an experienced engineer should notice it.
And an experienced software engineer won't notice?
It's more likely that the contractor botches up the job (or cheats) and doesn't build according to the required quality and spec - e.g. use more sand in the concrete to save cost, use less concrete, etc.
...and we're back to human factors. Thank you for disproving the article entirely on your own.
I'm not sure if I want to reply to AC's, but I forgot to mention I'm a structural engineer myself by education... Most structures of respectable size fall back on Finite Element Analysis to gauge the response to a variety of loads. [The estimation of loads is a research topic in itself, where the factors of safety comes from a rigorous stochastic-based reliability analysis].
Once analysis has been performed, design is a bit of intuition, but certainly not estimation - it's more of heuristics... so you say, "this worked last time, let me try this option and analyse if it'll work this time too."
So... A "real" engineer uses heuristics, common sense, estimation, and best of all, a complete unreliable piece of _software_ that was written by a programmer (who we just established can never be an engineer since they cannot be rigorous) to rigorously analyse his work? Looks to me like you are building your bridge on rather shaky grounds there, if you'll forgive the metaphore...
In the meantime, I found myself wondering how maintenance works for real structures. Apparently you _can_ rule out the human factor there completely, making "real" engineering thereby far more rigorous? Don't forget that "maintenance" means something very different for software than it does for real structures: you don't have to paint your software once every two years... What we call maintenance really is "changing the structure that is already there to become something else". I'd like to see someone add a lane or two to an existing bridge without involving humans at some point as a fundamental factor.
Look at that fourth screenshot. What possible harm could loading a project do, I wonder? Does it already (partially?) execute even when it is just sitting there in the development environment? Is this an attempt to banish evil compilers from accidentally compiling source?
And why is the answer always "make the user choose" even though there is absolutely no way to make an informed choice (same problem as with UAC or sudo: I don't want to hand over the keys to the kingdom, I only want to give out narrow and specific permissions, based on useful information, rather than some nebulous feeling of 'trust')?
I must be getting older because I just don't get too excited about "new" games. I wonder if I am leveling up in my Geekdom. I find myself caring less and less about video games and movies, and more and more about getting network jacks in every room in the house and getting all my DVDs ripped to a SAN so I stream them to the media room.
That's ok. It happens when you get older, and it is called "getting a life". One of these days you may even experience something called "sex". It almost beats ripping your DVD's to a SAN so you can stream them off your jacks in every room in your house...
Ask something in return. I'd suggest sexual favors from women, and money from guys.
Portability is nice, but I was referring to the fact that it is actually a standards-compliant, full-featured compiler. I have struggled with too many compilers that may produce great code, but *only* if you speak their local dialect. Which is a major pain if you try to produce portable code.
Example: ACC on HPUX. Don't get me wrong, I love it, and its error messages are in a class all on their own. But the standard clearly allows comma's in places where ACC throws an error. Sure, it's just a minor thing, but still...
Another example would be PostgreSQL, by the way.
Please provide me one example of a free/OSS platform implementation of a commercial product that is inarguable BETTER than the original proprietary version. OpenJDK > Sun (Sun wins). DirectX > OpenGL (MS wins). .Net > Mono.
OpenGL is not an open source product. But I'd argue that gcc is miles better than whatever crappy C compiler it originally replaced.
One idea, based on what I have seen work abroad, is to mandate, for a limited time, a fee of $1 on all Internet connections. You could then use that monthly credit to subscribe to whatever content you chose.
$1 for newspapers... $30 for the RIAA... Another $30 for the MPAA... $20 for game makers... $40 for professional software makers... $15 for TV makers... $10 for documentary makers... $3.50 for book authors...
Where does it end?
I'm all in favor of having a small linkable SVG library! I've been looking for something like that for a while, but haven't found anything acceptable for my needs. So instead of displaying the SVG's directly I prerender to PNG and show that instead. That makes the icons the only part of the user interface that don't scale.
I've considered ripping the rendering engine out of Inkscape and building a standalone library out of that. Problem is, it is a lot of work for a cosmetic gain...
Is is fast enough to get first post?
(Sarcasm guys)
Depends. What were you using when making that comment?
Anyway, why doesn't the article compare to XP as well? I'm sure 7 is beter than Vista, but we all agreed that Vista was crappy anyway. Will I see any benefit moving from XP though?
You couldnt be more wrong. There are still photographers who use film because they are snobbish elitists who feels it elevates them far above the unwashed masses with their convenient digital cameras
There, fixed that for you. But feel free to continu using film, you are not bothering me in the least...
Megapixels dont mean anything. You can have large number of megapixels in a point and shoot, but it still doesnt come near a pro-amerature / pro SLR as far as quality.
Yeah, yeah, we all know that by now. Bit of a straw man really. I don't think I actually know anyone who cares about megapixels. Things they do care about: size of the camera and convenience of the interface, and on the other side of the spectrum, quality of the lens and quality of the result.
I learned more about photography shooting film than I did with a digital.
Funny: I learned far more shooting digital than I ever did with film. With film I made the occasional picture when I was on holiday, only seeing the results three weeks later after I came back and had them developed. The link between how I used the camera and what results I got was totally non-existent because I would have forgotten about that stuff by the time I was looking at my crappy pictures.
And now? I take my digital (four megapixel) camera with me almost every weekend, I make multiple shots of anything I think is worth shooting, and since I get immediate feedback I have learned a great deal about how to properly use the camera and how to make great shots. I regularly produce high-quality pictures now (good framing, good light, good choice of subject matter).
And that's the crux of the matter, of course: the digital camera has allowed me to learn enough to approach the level of professional photographers, something that was previously only possible if you seriously dedicated yourself to it. I understand why that bothers people such as you, but you really shouldn't blame the tools...
... the definition of irony :)
I'd call that the definition of hypocrisy, actually.