It's not so idiotic if you place your chair not in front of the television set, but at an angle. Of course, you have to drag your dolby surround equipment somewhere else too.
Well if you don't mind, I'd really appreciate proof of this statement.
Proof is hard to give in a forum message, but I can give you an example. Dates are encoded in a document as something like [YY-MM-DD]. When the document is opened, it supplies the correct date in the requested format. In the Dutch version, the codes were translated to something like [JJ-MM-DD], because in Dutch "Year" is "Jaar". A Dutch Word would not understand an English date-code, and vice versa.
As I said, this may have been corrected in the newer Word versions. I can't say, because after this debacle I have only worked at companies that used English versions for everything. That is really the safest way to go.
Of course it was the translation, and, indeed, it was about an unknown device. All error code translations were so inferior, that an unsuspecting user would get totally confused. But this is still a rather innocent language problem. There are problems which are very bad. To give an example from another Microsoft product: I worked at a company where we had to use Word. Half of the people used a Dutch version of Word, the other half an English version. Unfortunately, documents made in the Dutch version would not be correctly readable by the English version, and vice versa. This was because the internal codes used by Microsoft in the document files were language dependent. Ridiculous, isn't it? To be fair, it might be that the current versions of Word are better compatible in this sense, although I would not be surprised if they were not.
Seems like a cool thing to do. Maybe I should also send a letter to Microsoft, stating that I just fined them $40 million, and would they please transfer it to my bank account. Or rather, leave it in cash, small unmarked bills, in the third toilet booth of the restroom facilities of Sleazy Sam's.
I dread the day when there will be 50 different versions of Windows out there.
But there ARE 50 different versions of Windows out there. Far more, even. Not only do you have different versions for different years (NT4, NT5, W95, W98, ME, 2000, XP), with different patch levels (XP bare bones, XP SP1, XP SP2), but Microsoft also brings out Windows in many different languages, which, unfortunately, all are subtly different. For different languages, the core functionalities will more or less match, but as soon as something "rare" happens (a device error, for instance), you can run into very weird behaviour. And you should, in general, not try to install English drivers on, for instance, a French system. Yes, it will work most of the time, but when it doesn't, your system will be pretty much screwed.
The most funny language idiocy I encountered with Windows was when it reported to me (translated from the original Dutch): "Undetectable device detected". This was the most amazing thing I ever saw Windows do. Luckily in my fit of laughter I had the presence of mind to make a screenprint, which I still treasure today.
Re:Thanks for Fixing the Problem
on
Google Fixes IE Bug
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The problem is that a browser with ActiveX activated can NEVER be secure. An ActiveX control is simply a Windows executable, which can do anything on the user's machine that Windows can do. And since the app you mention relies on ActiveX, Microsoft will never able to solve your problem.
You are not falling for it, do you? Microsoft has always been good in promising users that the NEXT version of Windows will be the one that FINALLY will do it right. And they have never been able to deliver.
I am an atheist... [s]o there are no absolute moral ideals for me.
What a great way to confirm people's misconceptions about atheism. The most ridiculous argument religious people bring against atheism is that atheists are immoral and that religion is the only way to make people moral. As an atheist, I feel it is quite the opposite: religious people are quit immoral because they don't think for themselves, they let a book or an old chap who wears a dress determine what they should think or do. Atheists don't have that fallback, so they are FORCED to take responsibility for their own actions. And if that is the case, an atheist MUST have a set of personal morals to follow. These are not governed by holy scriptures, but by ethical considerations on what makes society work. Lacking personal morals, it seems to me that such a person will indeed have no restraints from being criminal, except for perhaps a statistical consideration brought on by the fear of getting caught. In modern society, such a person is usually labeled "insane" and is a candidate for being locked up.
What an oddly old-fashioned way to say he's a tech guy.
If you did not know, a "fellow" is someone who is funded in a particular way. Usually a fellow is someone whose salary is guaranteed and who is allowed a certain budget for research, and has no obligations to produce anything. The idea is that fellowships are awarded to people who will produce the most valuable stuff if you give them free reign. Although I know of an IBM fellow who after receiving the fellowship went to lie on a beach for the rest of his days.
...wouldn't you just love to spend Bill's seemingly ulimited resources to fund your pet project?
Indeed. I have sometimes wondered what it would take for me to become a Microsoftie. Despite my loathing for the company, when Bill would offer me my own lab and a serious budget to hire staff, to do my own research until my retirement, I probably would get over my aversion quickly.
The problem is in the contracts. Basically, a publisher says: I will publish your paper in journal X, and you, the writer, will provide me this paper free of charge, will relinquish all copyrights to the paper, and will pay me a couple of thousand dollars (this last one is not that common, but it happens). Because the scientist no longer holds the copyrights to the paper, he cannot publish it on the web. Alternatively, the scientist can publish his paper ONLY on the web, but that way he loses all the status associated with publishing in a journal. Actually, most scientists have their job depend on the number of publications in "quality" journals.
In recent years things have changed a bit, and several publishers now allow an author to release a version of his paper on the web, but it cannot be the same version as the journal version, and they pressure the author in releasing it at least one year after the original publication.
It depends on the scientific discipline how many papers you will find republished on the web. For computer science, I estimate it is about 25%, which is quite high. The more recent the paper and the younger the researcher, the higher the chance you'll find it on the web. So I think that in a few years, most of recent computer science papers are available online.
As far as making the journals available free on the web? Nah, don't bother, since just about everyone who has a need for journal access already has it either through their employment, university, or library.
I assume you meant this sarcastically? Subscriptions to online versions of journals are incredibly expensive, usually a LOT more expensive than a subscription to a paper version (because more people can access the online version in parallel). In recent years, we have been cutting our online subscriptions in half, mainly because publishers raised their prices. As for third-world countries, there is no chance in hell most of them can afford online subscriptions.
To me, the best thing you can do is to get a CS degree and then come out of school with some major, game-related project to show off to people.
This is so true. I teach at a university and I have students work on game-related projects. But I always have to tell the students that they should remember that game design is not a subject of research of computer scientists. It is a subject of research for social and cultural scientists. If you want to build games, you simply have to learn to be a good computer scientist, preferably a generalist. During your studies, games are a nice area to practice your arts in, but there is very little that sets games apart from other challenging applications.
Perhaps you could share with us your incredibly accurate estimation technique?
It is called "experience", which Microsoft has plenty of.
Seriously, after a few years of designing and developing a certain kind of systems, I have become pretty good at estimating how much time a new system will take to build. I start by dividing the development process into tasks, estimate the time needed for each task (each task will take no more than 2 weeks, so you can plan it fairly well), sum everything, and then add 20-50% margin, depending on the size of the project (20% for small projects, 50% for very large ones). Usually when I look at the end total, I get a feeling that I might have calculated a bit too much, but I know I have that feeling every time, and I leave it like it is. I am accurate with a margin of about 5%.
My experience is that after I have made my estimation, I get lots of pressure from clients, sales managers, and higher-up staff, to reduce the needed time. Some of them even want to see all my estimates for smaller tasks, and try to remove a few days here and there. It is not difficult to argue "You estimate this task to be 10 days, but I think you can do it in 8, please tell me why you think you need 10." In the past, I have seen many of my colleagues buckle under the pressure and reduce their estimates. I don't. I simply point to my track record, and say "Perhaps this task might take a few days less, but other tasks might take a few days more. You can't be accurate on each single task, but the overall picture will be correct." The net result is that I manage to deliver good software on the deadlines, while my co-workers (at least those who have given in) are either late, or deliver crap. Some of them even got burn-outs.
So the answer is: estimates should be made by people who have to do the work, not the people who have to sell it.
First of all, Scott Adams is a cartoonist. He does not really have a scientific education. He does not really know what he talks about.
But his way of arguing is enlightening in the sense that it shows how people think about this debate. He says "ID has holes that evolutionists point out. Evolution has holes that IDers point out. Both sides have their points. So we should not choose between them."
The problem is that "evolutionists" know that they do not know everything about evolution (read that sentence again if you have trouble understanding it). You will be hard-pressed to find a scientist who claims that the theory of evolution is a finished chapter. But that does not disqualify the theory of evolution as a scientific theory.
But then an IDer comes along, points to an open question, and states "And that is where God comes in." How does an IDer know that? It is what he believes, nothing more.
Adams also states that IDers not necessarily want to place God in there." They do believe in evolution, according to Adams, they only indicate that there are holes in the theory. If that is the case, there would be no (or not many) problems with ID, but I think Adams is dead wrong here. The name "Intelligent Design" says it all: IDers give a place to a Designer in the evolution of species. Saying that "the Designer is not necessarily God" is meaningless, because there is no better definition of God than the Being that created Mankind.
Finally, I think that stating that evolution has "holes" in it, is misleading. It does not really have holes, it is just that there are still questions to be answered. A hole indicates that something is wrong, while in reality there are simply a few open points.
I just remember: in Civilization and Civilization II, we have Darwin's Voyage as a Wonder of the World. In Civilization III we have The Theory of Evolution as a Wonder of the World. In Civilization IV (arguably the best Civ until now) we have zippo in this respect. Was Firaxis also afraid of this idiotic controversy?
For five years I worked for a boss who was in the habit of taking jobs that nobody else wanted. The good thing was that he would get paid a lot. The bad thing was that I had to dabble in unmaintainable code. At one time I even had to make changes in a program for which no source code existed anymore. That was not the worst job, though. The worst was a change I had to make to a program that had the simple task of printing a list of articles in stock, with their locations. It printed the articles in two columns: the left column contained articles of types 1 and 2, and the right column contained articles of types 3 to 9. I had to change the program so that it would print three columns: left column the same, but the right column split into types 3 and 4, and 5 to 9. Does not sound too difficult, right? I mean, even without looking at the code, purely knowing the function of this program makes you think "that should been done in no more than 2 hours."
It took me two weeks. The program was peppered with functions that were copies of other functions with a very small change. The original programmer used ridiculous methods to fill print lines. The general way of printing a line is collecting information through a central function, and when that function has all the information it needs, print the line. In this case at dozens of points in the program the programmer tried to predict whether or not he would have enough information to print a line, and then do it. If I would have a design document, I would have rewritten the program from scratch, but of course no such document existed.
Every little change I made to the program had unforeseen effects. When I started, I had (of course) made a test-print, which I could use to compare outputs. I made a small change, and suddenly the list contained less articles than the original list. Another small change, and suddenly the list contained more articles than the original list. I tried to assess what reasoning the program would use to include or exclude articles, but there was no way to determine that from the code.
After two weeks of work the program printed three nice columns, with all the original articles there, and a few, very few, that were not on the original list. I could not understand why these extra articles were there, but if they should not be there, I thought it would be best if I would just implement a condition to exclude them, if I would know what that condition should be. So I called the company who used the programs and asked them about these extra articles. Their answer was, "My God, we have been missing those for YEARS. Now we'll finally be able to find them again."
Anyone who knows the similiar Star Trek quote this is derived from can safely assume right now that he will die a virgin by the way.
It's Shakespeare and Klingon, but since I already lost my virginity by the time I first encountered the relevant episode, I assume my experience doesn't really count. I guess I should be happy that I have been spared this wretched fate.
The Sony CDs will be causing problems for many years, as they are traded or sold to thrift stores.
Hm. It seems wise for me to stop buying legit CDs and from now on get all my music from a local bootlegger. At least then I can be sure that there won't be any crap on the CDs that might muck up my computer.
Currently quite a large chunk of the price of a new PC is for the Windows license. Suppose Windows would be free when ad-supported, then new PCs could be delivered with AdWindows installed instead of regular Windows with a 10% price reduction. Good deal!
Then, of course, you reformat and install Linux. A plan with no drawbacks!
Scott Adams produced loads of small adventures, but most of them sucked, even for the time they were created. Some of them, however, were absolutely shining. If am mainly thinking here of "The Count", an adventure that takes place in only about 10 rooms, with just a few objects, but has quite an intriguing story. The interesting thing is that things HAPPEN to the player in the story. It is obvious that there is a second person at work in the world, but you don't really get to meet him until the very end. This is, of course, pretty common in adventures nowadays (although about five years ago still many adventures were about the player as the only creature in an otherwise empty world), but at the time The Count was an innovation. Pretty creepy it was too. You knew things were going to happen when you fell asleep, and when the adventure informed you that you were getting more and more tired, it was quite spooky.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not so idiotic if you place your chair not in front of the television set, but at an angle. Of course, you have to drag your dolby surround equipment somewhere else too.
Proof is hard to give in a forum message, but I can give you an example. Dates are encoded in a document as something like [YY-MM-DD]. When the document is opened, it supplies the correct date in the requested format. In the Dutch version, the codes were translated to something like [JJ-MM-DD], because in Dutch "Year" is "Jaar". A Dutch Word would not understand an English date-code, and vice versa.
As I said, this may have been corrected in the newer Word versions. I can't say, because after this debacle I have only worked at companies that used English versions for everything. That is really the safest way to go.
You must be new here.
Of course it was the translation, and, indeed, it was about an unknown device. All error code translations were so inferior, that an unsuspecting user would get totally confused. But this is still a rather innocent language problem. There are problems which are very bad. To give an example from another Microsoft product: I worked at a company where we had to use Word. Half of the people used a Dutch version of Word, the other half an English version. Unfortunately, documents made in the Dutch version would not be correctly readable by the English version, and vice versa. This was because the internal codes used by Microsoft in the document files were language dependent. Ridiculous, isn't it? To be fair, it might be that the current versions of Word are better compatible in this sense, although I would not be surprised if they were not.
Seems like a cool thing to do. Maybe I should also send a letter to Microsoft, stating that I just fined them $40 million, and would they please transfer it to my bank account. Or rather, leave it in cash, small unmarked bills, in the third toilet booth of the restroom facilities of Sleazy Sam's.
But there ARE 50 different versions of Windows out there. Far more, even. Not only do you have different versions for different years (NT4, NT5, W95, W98, ME, 2000, XP), with different patch levels (XP bare bones, XP SP1, XP SP2), but Microsoft also brings out Windows in many different languages, which, unfortunately, all are subtly different. For different languages, the core functionalities will more or less match, but as soon as something "rare" happens (a device error, for instance), you can run into very weird behaviour. And you should, in general, not try to install English drivers on, for instance, a French system. Yes, it will work most of the time, but when it doesn't, your system will be pretty much screwed.
The most funny language idiocy I encountered with Windows was when it reported to me (translated from the original Dutch): "Undetectable device detected". This was the most amazing thing I ever saw Windows do. Luckily in my fit of laughter I had the presence of mind to make a screenprint, which I still treasure today.
The problem is that a browser with ActiveX activated can NEVER be secure. An ActiveX control is simply a Windows executable, which can do anything on the user's machine that Windows can do. And since the app you mention relies on ActiveX, Microsoft will never able to solve your problem.
I know, I suck too.
You are not falling for it, do you? Microsoft has always been good in promising users that the NEXT version of Windows will be the one that FINALLY will do it right. And they have never been able to deliver.
What a great way to confirm people's misconceptions about atheism. The most ridiculous argument religious people bring against atheism is that atheists are immoral and that religion is the only way to make people moral. As an atheist, I feel it is quite the opposite: religious people are quit immoral because they don't think for themselves, they let a book or an old chap who wears a dress determine what they should think or do. Atheists don't have that fallback, so they are FORCED to take responsibility for their own actions. And if that is the case, an atheist MUST have a set of personal morals to follow. These are not governed by holy scriptures, but by ethical considerations on what makes society work. Lacking personal morals, it seems to me that such a person will indeed have no restraints from being criminal, except for perhaps a statistical consideration brought on by the fear of getting caught. In modern society, such a person is usually labeled "insane" and is a candidate for being locked up.
Odd. I was reading "Crap co-founder joins MS".
If you did not know, a "fellow" is someone who is funded in a particular way. Usually a fellow is someone whose salary is guaranteed and who is allowed a certain budget for research, and has no obligations to produce anything. The idea is that fellowships are awarded to people who will produce the most valuable stuff if you give them free reign. Although I know of an IBM fellow who after receiving the fellowship went to lie on a beach for the rest of his days.
Indeed. I have sometimes wondered what it would take for me to become a Microsoftie. Despite my loathing for the company, when Bill would offer me my own lab and a serious budget to hire staff, to do my own research until my retirement, I probably would get over my aversion quickly.
In recent years things have changed a bit, and several publishers now allow an author to release a version of his paper on the web, but it cannot be the same version as the journal version, and they pressure the author in releasing it at least one year after the original publication.
It depends on the scientific discipline how many papers you will find republished on the web. For computer science, I estimate it is about 25%, which is quite high. The more recent the paper and the younger the researcher, the higher the chance you'll find it on the web. So I think that in a few years, most of recent computer science papers are available online.
I assume you meant this sarcastically? Subscriptions to online versions of journals are incredibly expensive, usually a LOT more expensive than a subscription to a paper version (because more people can access the online version in parallel). In recent years, we have been cutting our online subscriptions in half, mainly because publishers raised their prices. As for third-world countries, there is no chance in hell most of them can afford online subscriptions.
This is so true. I teach at a university and I have students work on game-related projects. But I always have to tell the students that they should remember that game design is not a subject of research of computer scientists. It is a subject of research for social and cultural scientists. If you want to build games, you simply have to learn to be a good computer scientist, preferably a generalist. During your studies, games are a nice area to practice your arts in, but there is very little that sets games apart from other challenging applications.
It is called "experience", which Microsoft has plenty of.
Seriously, after a few years of designing and developing a certain kind of systems, I have become pretty good at estimating how much time a new system will take to build. I start by dividing the development process into tasks, estimate the time needed for each task (each task will take no more than 2 weeks, so you can plan it fairly well), sum everything, and then add 20-50% margin, depending on the size of the project (20% for small projects, 50% for very large ones). Usually when I look at the end total, I get a feeling that I might have calculated a bit too much, but I know I have that feeling every time, and I leave it like it is. I am accurate with a margin of about 5%.
My experience is that after I have made my estimation, I get lots of pressure from clients, sales managers, and higher-up staff, to reduce the needed time. Some of them even want to see all my estimates for smaller tasks, and try to remove a few days here and there. It is not difficult to argue "You estimate this task to be 10 days, but I think you can do it in 8, please tell me why you think you need 10." In the past, I have seen many of my colleagues buckle under the pressure and reduce their estimates. I don't. I simply point to my track record, and say "Perhaps this task might take a few days less, but other tasks might take a few days more. You can't be accurate on each single task, but the overall picture will be correct." The net result is that I manage to deliver good software on the deadlines, while my co-workers (at least those who have given in) are either late, or deliver crap. Some of them even got burn-outs.
So the answer is: estimates should be made by people who have to do the work, not the people who have to sell it.
But his way of arguing is enlightening in the sense that it shows how people think about this debate. He says "ID has holes that evolutionists point out. Evolution has holes that IDers point out. Both sides have their points. So we should not choose between them."
The problem is that "evolutionists" know that they do not know everything about evolution (read that sentence again if you have trouble understanding it). You will be hard-pressed to find a scientist who claims that the theory of evolution is a finished chapter. But that does not disqualify the theory of evolution as a scientific theory.
But then an IDer comes along, points to an open question, and states "And that is where God comes in." How does an IDer know that? It is what he believes, nothing more.
Adams also states that IDers not necessarily want to place God in there." They do believe in evolution, according to Adams, they only indicate that there are holes in the theory. If that is the case, there would be no (or not many) problems with ID, but I think Adams is dead wrong here. The name "Intelligent Design" says it all: IDers give a place to a Designer in the evolution of species. Saying that "the Designer is not necessarily God" is meaningless, because there is no better definition of God than the Being that created Mankind.
Finally, I think that stating that evolution has "holes" in it, is misleading. It does not really have holes, it is just that there are still questions to be answered. A hole indicates that something is wrong, while in reality there are simply a few open points.
I just remember: in Civilization and Civilization II, we have Darwin's Voyage as a Wonder of the World. In Civilization III we have The Theory of Evolution as a Wonder of the World. In Civilization IV (arguably the best Civ until now) we have zippo in this respect. Was Firaxis also afraid of this idiotic controversy?
For five years I worked for a boss who was in the habit of taking jobs that nobody else wanted. The good thing was that he would get paid a lot. The bad thing was that I had to dabble in unmaintainable code. At one time I even had to make changes in a program for which no source code existed anymore. That was not the worst job, though. The worst was a change I had to make to a program that had the simple task of printing a list of articles in stock, with their locations. It printed the articles in two columns: the left column contained articles of types 1 and 2, and the right column contained articles of types 3 to 9. I had to change the program so that it would print three columns: left column the same, but the right column split into types 3 and 4, and 5 to 9. Does not sound too difficult, right? I mean, even without looking at the code, purely knowing the function of this program makes you think "that should been done in no more than 2 hours."
It took me two weeks. The program was peppered with functions that were copies of other functions with a very small change. The original programmer used ridiculous methods to fill print lines. The general way of printing a line is collecting information through a central function, and when that function has all the information it needs, print the line. In this case at dozens of points in the program the programmer tried to predict whether or not he would have enough information to print a line, and then do it. If I would have a design document, I would have rewritten the program from scratch, but of course no such document existed.
Every little change I made to the program had unforeseen effects. When I started, I had (of course) made a test-print, which I could use to compare outputs. I made a small change, and suddenly the list contained less articles than the original list. Another small change, and suddenly the list contained more articles than the original list. I tried to assess what reasoning the program would use to include or exclude articles, but there was no way to determine that from the code.
After two weeks of work the program printed three nice columns, with all the original articles there, and a few, very few, that were not on the original list. I could not understand why these extra articles were there, but if they should not be there, I thought it would be best if I would just implement a condition to exclude them, if I would know what that condition should be. So I called the company who used the programs and asked them about these extra articles. Their answer was, "My God, we have been missing those for YEARS. Now we'll finally be able to find them again."
It's Shakespeare and Klingon, but since I already lost my virginity by the time I first encountered the relevant episode, I assume my experience doesn't really count. I guess I should be happy that I have been spared this wretched fate.
Hm. It seems wise for me to stop buying legit CDs and from now on get all my music from a local bootlegger. At least then I can be sure that there won't be any crap on the CDs that might muck up my computer.
Then, of course, you reformat and install Linux. A plan with no drawbacks!
Scott Adams produced loads of small adventures, but most of them sucked, even for the time they were created. Some of them, however, were absolutely shining. If am mainly thinking here of "The Count", an adventure that takes place in only about 10 rooms, with just a few objects, but has quite an intriguing story. The interesting thing is that things HAPPEN to the player in the story. It is obvious that there is a second person at work in the world, but you don't really get to meet him until the very end. This is, of course, pretty common in adventures nowadays (although about five years ago still many adventures were about the player as the only creature in an otherwise empty world), but at the time The Count was an innovation. Pretty creepy it was too. You knew things were going to happen when you fell asleep, and when the adventure informed you that you were getting more and more tired, it was quite spooky.
So, are you saying that if it is art, it should not have a purpose?
Now I understand why a turd in a jar can be considered art!