Anything by Gannsle is a good read. If I remember correctly, he used to have a long-running column in the excellent, but now-defunct Embedded Systems Programming magazine, plus he used to be based a few miles up the road from me in Maryland. (The magazine in general--and Gannsle's other writings--were/are good reads for all programmers, not just for embedded systems programmers.)
Last year, I read An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon. The book presented eugenics as conventional wisdom at the time, generally a popular, non-controversial idea; who didn't want healthy smart kids. The Catholic Church supported the movement's goals and some Catholics were among the movement's movers and shakers. However, the Catholic Church eventually began to part way with the movement on the subject of contraception use and forced sterilization.
In other words, Margaret Sanger was not out of the mainstream with respect to eugenics at that time.
But frankly I have a VERY hard time believing that the engineers involved did not know that what they were doing would violate the law.
I know you know engineers, so this question is rhetorical: Do you know engineers?
10 years ago, I worked on a project that adapted an existing codebase to use CORBA and, as a selling point, used wide-character strings in the interfaces for "internationization". One developer wrote an inline C++ function to convert a wide-character string to a normal C character string and everyone was forced to use it, including me. His "sophisticated"-looking code checked if the value of the wide character would fit in the target character width (which, while not explicitly specified in the code, was of course 8 bits). If not, an error exception was raised. If so, the wide character was simply truncated to the target character width. In other words, our whole system only handled Unicode values between 0 and 255.
Several times, I tried to raise the issue that this approach was wrong; the better approach was to convert wide-character strings to UTF-8, which our existing software could use without problems regardless of the wide-character values (except possibly in the GUI, which was done by another group). The managers and the other developers (who didn't know much about Unicode) took the side of the other developer, who insisted that his approach worked.
So, we had a whole bunch of developers using something they didn't understand that was wrong. And many of the developers were very smart. Hence I can imagine the engineers at VW implementing the emissions test without worrying about the legal implications and not thinking to get verification in writing of the requirement.
To make matters worse, the developers (not in our company, but who, I am sure, were reasonably smart) who wrote the TAO CORBA implementation we used didn't understand the (pretty straightforward) CORBA GIOP/IIOP specification of how to marshal/unmarshal wide-character strings over the network--and they got it wrong! This was a known problem on the TAO support forum for the version of TAO we were using; I had a parallel implementation of IIOP, became aware of the problem, and therefore looked for it on the forum. Our other developers probably didn't read the forum or weren't aware of the problem. Before I left the project (voluntarily), I warned that there might be trouble if this problem was ever fixed. (Our system controlled satellites. Before rolling out a new version of our system, a client company would run the new version for a while in parallel with the earlier version of our system that was in place, both versions communicating with each other, until they were confident there were no problems. With the wide-character string encoding fixed in TAO, our new and old system versions wouldn't be able to talk to each other; possibly there was a run-time configuration tweak to have the new version of TAO revert to the old broken protocol for wide-character strings.)
This is an old idea. Back in the 1980s, a headhunter was no longer interested in talking to me after I said I was a computer programmer--he wanted to talk to designers. Well, of course, at our company (GE), we did the whole shebang: requirements, design, coding, testing, and integration. Simply saying I was a programmer had negative connotations.
A few years later (c. 1990), at a smaller company, I worked as a subcontractor to a large defense contractor and I encountered people who preferred just designing programs, writing them in a high-level pseudo-design language and then passing the designs off to "programmers" to be coded and tested. The problem is that there was no feedback loop, so these designers never really learned from what they did right and what they did wrong (as well as not getting hands-on experience with the technologies we were using), precious experience for a software developer.
Most Opera browser add-ons for converting YouTube to mp3 work by submitting the YouTube URL to various on-line converter sites such as YouTube-MP3.org. The add-on description tells you the ripping site. No need to Google ripping sites. I imagine other browser add-ons work the same way.
Most of my conversions are of generally poor-quality live recordings, so bad soundcards and speakers don't really matter.
Deforestation can destroy agricultural land via increased soil erosion, but deforestation is also the means by which more agricultural land is obtained. Which is bad. Suggested readings: Collapse by Jared Diamond and Planetary boundaries ("Land use" in particular).
Any organization (government, corporate, academic, etc.) larger than a small startup develops bureaucracies; it's the nature of an organization. If you think bureaucracies and deadwood are only found in government, take a good hard look around you at the company you work for. Think about the unrelated companies you deal with daily. (You're going to tell me that spending hours on the phone with a private health insurance company trying to get something resolved is "better" or "more efficient" than the same amount of time spent at the DMV?) Government is not immune to bureaucratic problems, but neither are private companies.
You're correct on most counts, except maybe regarding newbies. I started out with a commercial (Unipress) version of Emacs, heavily customized, in the late 1980s. Our overlords (the contractor we were subcontracted to), rather than buying the source, foolishly bought the binary version for Motorola-based Sun workstations, so we were out of luck when we switched to SparcStations. I downloaded the original MicroEmacs, modified some of the code for my own purposes, and heavily customized it. I've used it on Unix/Linux platforms ever since (20+ years). In 2001, for Windows work, I downloaded JASSPA MicroEmacs (http://www.jasspa.com/), modified the code to treat the PC keypad as a VT100 keypad in application mode, and reused my UNIX/Linux customizations. I've been a happy camper for a long time; I like the small footprint and how quick it is. (The same can be said about VI, but I was not that crazy about VI when I used to use it a lot.)
JASSPA MicroEmacs (free) also works under UNIX/Linux; I just haven't bothered to change over from my original MicroEmacs package. The JASSPA version also supports the mouse and menus, which I use infrequently.
CBT (the cognitive kind!) may be effective for milder forms of depression, but not for more severe forms (like I have). My current psychiatrist even recommended against it for me because the chance of failure is so high that it could make my depression worse. CBT is generally very effective for OCD (which I also have). The kind of CBT the Chinmeister recommends sounds very promising, but I don't think my wife would go for it!:(
Reminds me of the ARIANE 5 rocket failure in 1996. IIRC, they reused Ada code from an earlier rocket, the range of one of the rocket parameters had changed, they didn't correct the range of the corresponding variable, and a run-time exception occurred seconds after launch. Too easy to overlook... Still, you're better off with Ada than without on mission-critical systems like that.
I live on the East Coast and a lot of people don't turn on their lights when it rains, even though it became the law a few years ago. No location has a monopoly on common sense. Also, are daytime running lights no longer required? Our old Toyota car and van had DRL, but we had to replace the van with a 2012 Kia SUV which doesn't have DRL.
(Washington, D.C. area, famously populated by out-of-state drivers who don't know how to drive in the snow!)
I discovered this language some years ago. If I remember correctly, the language was developed after a late-night drinking binge.
There are some languages that use MIDI music files as their source code; e.g., Velato.
I worked in software development. I've met teachers who are smart in their fields and in technology. I've never met a teacher who thought they were smarter than everyone else because of their teaching degree. I've met a lot of software folks who weren't too smart or whose knowledge was a mile deep and an inch wide. Teaching is no different than any other profession - you have the same distribution of talent.
In real code, you localize based on entire messages, not individual words. How do you localize an English word that, with one spelling, may be a noun or verb and, in the latter case, may be of different tenses? You would need the context of the entire message and a natural language processor to translate the word. (Localizing the common word "The" in isolation as you do is fraught with errors.) Consequently, it's better (and quicker and easier) to translate entire messages rather than individual words.
Voters are dumb. There is a reason the people who introduced democracy never intended for everyone to be a voter. Not the Greeks and not the Americans. Votes were once restricted to people who could at least be presumed to have more then two braincells to rub together. In modern times... well that homeless guy can vote...
Yes, restrict voting to white men who own property - exclude poor men, women, non-whites, and small furry creatures.
After I got an E-book reader several years ago, I went to my local library, got a new library card, and surfed over to the state of Maryland's E-book site (shared by all public library systems in the state). Slim pickings. Mostly recent fiction and self-help books - there weren't even subject categories for science and technology. Very disappointing.
Fortran is just as old as Lisp and still a viable programming language. It is widely used in scientific computing and high-performance computing. I like both languages; good on both of them. Neither language is as simple now as they were in the early days.
I used to use server-push in a custom Tcl-based web server back in the 1990s. Early versions of Opera supported server-push, but then it was dropped in later versions. Too bad because it was a nice technique at the time.
Guile is Scheme, not Lisp and not a DSL. According to the GIMP web site, their extension language was SIOD (Scheme In One Defun), but is now TinyScheme. TinyScheme is not itself a DSL, although GIMP has probably added some image-processing-specific extensions.
One would expect a certain amount of classical education on the part of the aristocracy (e.g., Lords), but I guess not if they belong to the Tea Party. "Reign" is spelled "rein".
3-letter file extensions aren't necessarily a sign of 8.3 filenames, they just happen to be 3 letters long. What's your proposed replacement for ".log"? Administrators and users who use a shell will just love you for picking longer extensions.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Anything by Gannsle is a good read. If I remember correctly, he used to have a long-running column in the excellent, but now-defunct Embedded Systems Programming magazine, plus he used to be based a few miles up the road from me in Maryland. (The magazine in general--and Gannsle's other writings--were/are good reads for all programmers, not just for embedded systems programmers.)
Last year, I read An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon. The book presented eugenics as conventional wisdom at the time, generally a popular, non-controversial idea; who didn't want healthy smart kids. The Catholic Church supported the movement's goals and some Catholics were among the movement's movers and shakers. However, the Catholic Church eventually began to part way with the movement on the subject of contraception use and forced sterilization. In other words, Margaret Sanger was not out of the mainstream with respect to eugenics at that time.
But frankly I have a VERY hard time believing that the engineers involved did not know that what they were doing would violate the law.
I know you know engineers, so this question is rhetorical: Do you know engineers?
10 years ago, I worked on a project that adapted an existing codebase to use CORBA and, as a selling point, used wide-character strings in the interfaces for "internationization". One developer wrote an inline C++ function to convert a wide-character string to a normal C character string and everyone was forced to use it, including me. His "sophisticated"-looking code checked if the value of the wide character would fit in the target character width (which, while not explicitly specified in the code, was of course 8 bits). If not, an error exception was raised. If so, the wide character was simply truncated to the target character width. In other words, our whole system only handled Unicode values between 0 and 255.
Several times, I tried to raise the issue that this approach was wrong; the better approach was to convert wide-character strings to UTF-8, which our existing software could use without problems regardless of the wide-character values (except possibly in the GUI, which was done by another group). The managers and the other developers (who didn't know much about Unicode) took the side of the other developer, who insisted that his approach worked.
So, we had a whole bunch of developers using something they didn't understand that was wrong. And many of the developers were very smart. Hence I can imagine the engineers at VW implementing the emissions test without worrying about the legal implications and not thinking to get verification in writing of the requirement.
To make matters worse, the developers (not in our company, but who, I am sure, were reasonably smart) who wrote the TAO CORBA implementation we used didn't understand the (pretty straightforward) CORBA GIOP/IIOP specification of how to marshal/unmarshal wide-character strings over the network--and they got it wrong! This was a known problem on the TAO support forum for the version of TAO we were using; I had a parallel implementation of IIOP, became aware of the problem, and therefore looked for it on the forum. Our other developers probably didn't read the forum or weren't aware of the problem. Before I left the project (voluntarily), I warned that there might be trouble if this problem was ever fixed. (Our system controlled satellites. Before rolling out a new version of our system, a client company would run the new version for a while in parallel with the earlier version of our system that was in place, both versions communicating with each other, until they were confident there were no problems. With the wide-character string encoding fixed in TAO, our new and old system versions wouldn't be able to talk to each other; possibly there was a run-time configuration tweak to have the new version of TAO revert to the old broken protocol for wide-character strings.)
This is an old idea. Back in the 1980s, a headhunter was no longer interested in talking to me after I said I was a computer programmer--he wanted to talk to designers. Well, of course, at our company (GE), we did the whole shebang: requirements, design, coding, testing, and integration. Simply saying I was a programmer had negative connotations.
A few years later (c. 1990), at a smaller company, I worked as a subcontractor to a large defense contractor and I encountered people who preferred just designing programs, writing them in a high-level pseudo-design language and then passing the designs off to "programmers" to be coded and tested. The problem is that there was no feedback loop, so these designers never really learned from what they did right and what they did wrong (as well as not getting hands-on experience with the technologies we were using), precious experience for a software developer.
Most Opera browser add-ons for converting YouTube to mp3 work by submitting the YouTube URL to various on-line converter sites such as YouTube-MP3.org. The add-on description tells you the ripping site. No need to Google ripping sites. I imagine other browser add-ons work the same way.
Most of my conversions are of generally poor-quality live recordings, so bad soundcards and speakers don't really matter.
Deforestation can destroy agricultural land via increased soil erosion, but deforestation is also the means by which more agricultural land is obtained. Which is bad. Suggested readings: Collapse by Jared Diamond and Planetary boundaries ("Land use" in particular).
Any organization (government, corporate, academic, etc.) larger than a small startup develops bureaucracies; it's the nature of an organization. If you think bureaucracies and deadwood are only found in government, take a good hard look around you at the company you work for. Think about the unrelated companies you deal with daily. (You're going to tell me that spending hours on the phone with a private health insurance company trying to get something resolved is "better" or "more efficient" than the same amount of time spent at the DMV?) Government is not immune to bureaucratic problems, but neither are private companies.
You're correct on most counts, except maybe regarding newbies. I started out with a commercial (Unipress) version of Emacs, heavily customized, in the late 1980s. Our overlords (the contractor we were subcontracted to), rather than buying the source, foolishly bought the binary version for Motorola-based Sun workstations, so we were out of luck when we switched to SparcStations. I downloaded the original MicroEmacs, modified some of the code for my own purposes, and heavily customized it. I've used it on Unix/Linux platforms ever since (20+ years). In 2001, for Windows work, I downloaded JASSPA MicroEmacs (http://www.jasspa.com/), modified the code to treat the PC keypad as a VT100 keypad in application mode, and reused my UNIX/Linux customizations. I've been a happy camper for a long time; I like the small footprint and how quick it is. (The same can be said about VI, but I was not that crazy about VI when I used to use it a lot.)
JASSPA MicroEmacs (free) also works under UNIX/Linux; I just haven't bothered to change over from my original MicroEmacs package. The JASSPA version also supports the mouse and menus, which I use infrequently.
CBT (the cognitive kind!) may be effective for milder forms of depression, but not for more severe forms (like I have). My current psychiatrist even recommended against it for me because the chance of failure is so high that it could make my depression worse. CBT is generally very effective for OCD (which I also have). The kind of CBT the Chinmeister recommends sounds very promising, but I don't think my wife would go for it! :(
9/3 was the recommended position in my high school Drivers Ed class back in the early 1970s - 10/2 was outdated back then.
Never spent hours on the phone with your health insurance company trying to get something straightened out?
Reminds me of the ARIANE 5 rocket failure in 1996. IIRC, they reused Ada code from an earlier rocket, the range of one of the rocket parameters had changed, they didn't correct the range of the corresponding variable, and a run-time exception occurred seconds after launch. Too easy to overlook ... Still, you're better off with Ada than without on mission-critical systems like that.
I live on the East Coast and a lot of people don't turn on their lights when it rains, even though it became the law a few years ago. No location has a monopoly on common sense. Also, are daytime running lights no longer required? Our old Toyota car and van had DRL, but we had to replace the van with a 2012 Kia SUV which doesn't have DRL.
(Washington, D.C. area, famously populated by out-of-state drivers who don't know how to drive in the snow!)
I discovered this language some years ago. If I remember correctly, the language was developed after a late-night drinking binge. There are some languages that use MIDI music files as their source code; e.g., Velato.
And the inventor of the transistor, Shockley, thought blacks were inferior to whites. Quick, throw out your transistor radios and computers!
I worked in software development. I've met teachers who are smart in their fields and in technology. I've never met a teacher who thought they were smarter than everyone else because of their teaching degree. I've met a lot of software folks who weren't too smart or whose knowledge was a mile deep and an inch wide. Teaching is no different than any other profession - you have the same distribution of talent.
In real code, you localize based on entire messages, not individual words. How do you localize an English word that, with one spelling, may be a noun or verb and, in the latter case, may be of different tenses? You would need the context of the entire message and a natural language processor to translate the word. (Localizing the common word "The" in isolation as you do is fraught with errors.) Consequently, it's better (and quicker and easier) to translate entire messages rather than individual words.
Voters are dumb. There is a reason the people who introduced democracy never intended for everyone to be a voter. Not the Greeks and not the Americans. Votes were once restricted to people who could at least be presumed to have more then two braincells to rub together. In modern times... well that homeless guy can vote...
Yes, restrict voting to white men who own property - exclude poor men, women, non-whites, and small furry creatures.
After I got an E-book reader several years ago, I went to my local library, got a new library card, and surfed over to the state of Maryland's E-book site (shared by all public library systems in the state). Slim pickings. Mostly recent fiction and self-help books - there weren't even subject categories for science and technology. Very disappointing.
Fortran is just as old as Lisp and still a viable programming language. It is widely used in scientific computing and high-performance computing. I like both languages; good on both of them. Neither language is as simple now as they were in the early days.
I used to use server-push in a custom Tcl-based web server back in the 1990s. Early versions of Opera supported server-push, but then it was dropped in later versions. Too bad because it was a nice technique at the time.
Guile is Scheme, not Lisp and not a DSL. According to the GIMP web site, their extension language was SIOD (Scheme In One Defun), but is now TinyScheme. TinyScheme is not itself a DSL, although GIMP has probably added some image-processing-specific extensions.
One would expect a certain amount of classical education on the part of the aristocracy (e.g., Lords), but I guess not if they belong to the Tea Party. "Reign" is spelled "rein".
From a classic issue of ACM's Computing Surveys devoted entirely to authors responding to Dijkstra's article.
3-letter file extensions aren't necessarily a sign of 8.3 filenames, they just happen to be 3 letters long. What's your proposed replacement for ".log"? Administrators and users who use a shell will just love you for picking longer extensions. :)