Electric cars don't need *any* transmission. That's a huge weight and efficiency saving right there.
Internal combustion engines are a very poor choice to drive cars really. Limited rev range? Check. (Hence needs gears). Can't run down to zero speed? Check. (Hence needs a clutch). Reciprocating parts require great strength to withstand forces? Check. Needs large and heavy casing to withstand pressures? Check. Fundamental efficiency limited by Carnot Heat Cycle? Check. Electric motors as a means of propulsion is a no-brainer. It's just the damn batteries...
Then you're an idiot, if you still think it's equivalent to a gaussian blur. You may not prefer the way fonts are rendered on the Mac, but that's just your opinion. The technical details of what you claimed are how fonts are rendered on the Mac are laughably off the mark.
A lot of mediocre programmers seem to complain about Objective-C syntax and Cocoa and whatnot. I can tell you, after 14 years immersed in C++, Cocoa/Objective-C was a breath of fresh air. I picked up the language in about a day and the basics of Cocoa in a few more. Obviously getting really comfortable with it takes a while longer but after doing Cocoa solidly now for 5 years I'd find it very hard to give up. If you've yet to see the advantage then you're probably not doing anything seriously with it. The dynamic dispatch alone simplifies things in a way that C++ can only dream of.
As for MFC, it's a total joke compared to what you can accomplish in Cocoa with a fraction of the code and with a result in another league in terms of stability and quality.
I'm not a rabid fanboi or whatever I'll probably get accused of, but after using a number of languages and frameworks over the years (including developing my own general purpose framework in C++ for Mac) I can tell you that in my experience Cocoa is the best there is right now, and that has been the case for a while.
Creation Science is built around the idea that if you start with the Bible as the source of your hypotheses, you should be able to find scientific evidence that is consistent with those hypotheses. If the evidence instead contradicts your hypothesis, then either your evidence is flawed, your interpretation of the evidence is flawed, or your interpretation of the Bible is flawed.
Ignoring the howling oxymoron with which you open this statement, you also disallow the most obvious interpretation when evidence contradicts your hypothesis: that the hypothesis is wrong. If right out of the gate you are not prepared to accept that possibility, then no matter how you dress it up in disguise, or surround it with fancy pseudo-scientific jargon, it just ain't science.
For instance, what about all of the time and money that is wasted by employees viewing videos on YouTube? That may not necessarily be the equivalent of faulty software; but those videos eat bandwidth and slow PC performance down. That forces corporate IT to make a decision as to whether or not they need to block YouTube on the firewall. If they do that, any legitimate business use of video on YouTube is no longer viable.
If a person chooses to view YouTube instead of doing some work, that's their choice. If there are bad consequences for that person, or time and money lost by his employer, well, the blame rests solely with that person. That's a big difference from software that just crashes without warning, causing some amount of work to be lost, and the time to recover the situation having to be spent. In that case the employee is blameless, but the loser is still him and/or his employer.
Crashes may be relatively rare these days and that's to be welcomed, but there are still delays caused by software problems that really don't need to be there. More attention to quality and stability on the part of the software (and OS) vendors would help.
Star Wars figurines in their pristine presentation boxes are a point of pride and a symbol of an achievement
This is what I don't really get about collecting stuff like this. It' s not an achievement, in any sensible definition of the word. You just bought something that somebody else thought up, designed, got made, marketed and sold. So what? It's just another form of consumerism, and anything so-called "limited edition" is just a device marketers use to tap into this hoarder/collector mentality.
There are some things worth collecting, I've no doubt, but it's usually the "accidentally collectible" stuff that is infinitely more interesting, and to me that almost never includes mass-produced plastic moulded objects.
If Microsoft hadn't been the ones, someone else, or more likely several someone elses, would have. And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.
In the early 80s there were plenty of smaller players in the marketplace all with interesting products and different ideas. A more natural outgrowth of that which maintained that balance would have been much healthier. And while that probably would have led to a period of incompatibility and lack of standards, the lack of strong defacto standards may well have created a push for more industry standards earlier. By now many of those things that are still needed (standards for document, and multimedia interchange) would have long been settled.
For all the advantages that computers confer on society, don't forget the huge losses in both time and money that the poor quality of Windows and its apps have caused.
Whoever modded me as "Troll" for posting this below is a fuckwit. This is nothing but a simple statement of fact.
"Every copy of OS X comes with a complete set of developer tools - GCC, Xcode (integrated IDE), Interface Builder, GDB and plenty of other stuff. *If* you're interested in learning to program and you have a Mac, it's all right there in the box."
I realise there are UK mags, but it's what I grew up with and having read a large number of US and Australian publications over the years as well, I believe the UK publications are actually better than the world average. I may be biased however;-)
If I were a magazine publisher, I'd be worried by the fact that apparently no-one has suggested this!
Last time I looked there were still a number of good electronics publications on sale, and I mention them because that's how I got started, back in the day (70s). Back then there were a wide range of mags that covered a similarly wide range of abilities and interests; I expect that's narrowed now, but those that have survived tend to be the better, more in-depth ones. They often cover a lot of theory though of course you probably need to subscribe to a particular title for a year or more to get a complete picture. The advantage though is that they regularly publish interesting and sometimes unusual projects as well as supply the parts in kit form, so you can pick something to build that interests you and fill in the theory as you go.
One of my favourites in the 80s was "Elektor" which I believe was a Dutch publication, though in English. Very high quality production standards of both mag and kits, and they didn't have a patronising tone. Wide range of projects - audio, micros, test gear, RF etc. Lots of theory. No idea if it's still published. Others back then were "Wireless World" (sounded dated even then but excellent mag - emphasis on RF), "Electronics Today International" (ETI) - some great audio and early micro projects, though I'm pretty certain this one isn't published any more, "Practical Wireless" (also RF) and many others aimed more at beginners. Check out your local newsagent - even if you only picked up one they are (or were) a great source of information and suppliers just from the ads alone.
Every copy of OS X comes with a complete set of developer tools - GCC, Xcode (integrated IDE), Interface Builder, GDB and plenty of other stuff. *If* you're interested in learning to program and you have a Mac, it's all right there in the box.
The fact is, some people are better programmers than others. Trying to find some correlation between the degree of "betterness" and ones gender, or sexual orientation, seems to me quite pointless, since the quality of code is quite impossible to measure objectively. There are certain coding behaviours that are frequently considered "good" and others that are the opposite, but these are largely subjective and often a matter of personal preference.
My view is that some coders don't realise that they are not communicating with a machine when they write code, they are communicating with another human being - even if that person is themselves, at some future time. Those coders who realise this are better at coding than those who are not, which is all you can really say. While this sort of fits with our preconceived notions of what women are supposedly better at than men in general, it's all very wooly and unscientific. I bet the author of this "study" cherry-picked data to support the argument, which is not doing science.
I remember in vivid detail that afternoon when I first connected two interconnects comprised of two TESLA Tricon geometries in parallel. [...] This was major improvement in an area that I did not think could be improved upon.
Then I also remembered, I'd spent the night in an acid den and was totally off my head. It was the green-spotted pink snakes emanating from the left speaker that finally tipped me off that it wasn't the cables after all.
Yes, and they're going to start a whole new series of code-names based not on big cats, but fictional rock bands. The first of these is the Mac OS XI "Spinal Tap".
I disagree - the brain is better understood than the mind, at present. Both are understood poorly overall though. But since the brain is the only obtainable physical object that actually implements intelligence, it's all we have to study.
I'm not sure that it will ever be possible to get to a complete understanding of mind/intelligence even if we have a complete model of the physical brain. It's like taking a memory dump of a computer and trying to reverse engineer the source code of the operating system and all of its applications and stored data, when all you have are billions of 1s and 0s and nothing to tell you what the instruction set is, let alone how data structures are organised and so on. This would be almost impossible with today's ordinary computers, which are vastly simpler and dumber than a brain and whose underlying principles are fully understood. The sheer size of this task suggests we may never be able to fathom it, though that's not to say it's not worth trying.
On the other hand, try this. Create a new project in Xcode. Open mainmenu.nib in Interface Builder. Drag an NSTextView to a window, save, compile, run. Result - a complete functional word processor. You can even type "hello world" into it if you want.
Also, haven't they ever heard of the phrase "lala-land" to mean somebody who's crazy? Somehow appropriate... but possibly not the best name they could have chosen.
I think Britain is a hugely underrated country, and living away for 7 years made me appreciate it so much more, and the Aussies are right - whining poms!
The Aussies only complain about us whinging (not whining) if it's about Australia. Knocking Britain is fine;-) Australia isn't perfect and there are aspects of Britain I really do appreciate. However, food in supermarkets in Australia is much cheaper, fresher, with more variety, still largely seasonal, travelled generally less far and is in much greater proportion to ready meals. Last time I visited a Tesco in the UK (admittedly at Christmas time) I could hardly find any real food - half the store was "seasonal goods" (and what the hell are Tesco doing selling tellys?) and what was left of the food section seemed to be 60% pre-packed or pre-cooked (pre-grated cheese? I mean, WTF??? How hard is it to grate cheese!). Some food in the UK is now universally so awful (yes Bacon, I'm looking at you) that many people have probably never experienced what the real thing tastes like. (Hint: go to a proper farmer's market and find out.)
The other thing that's better in Britain is the beer, whatever an Aussie might try to claim otherwise. Which is an interesting point, because at one time, beer looked to be utterly fucked. Thanks to CAMRA you can now find decent beer almost everywhere, so it proves that grass-roots movements can achieve things. So maybe there is hope - Brits just need to start caring about their food, their health and their political representatives as much as they have shown they cared about their beer!
I should think they ought to give me a guest spot on "Grumpy Old Men" at this rate. Which is another bloody thing, reality TV..........
There is a lot of space here that's completely empty
Well, surely that depends on your definition of "empty". Try the Australian bush, that's empty. I enjoy country walks in Britain, but I can honestly say that unless you go trespassing on private land (or own a lot of it) then you literally cannot go anywhere without bumping into someone. Seriously - try finding a quiet spot to have outdoor sex in Britain! (Unless you're the exhibitionist type, you are likely to give up in frustration). I realise that's not quite your point, but I don't think filling up all space in between the overcrowded towns is really the answer, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Wake me up when it has a manual transmission
Electric cars don't need *any* transmission. That's a huge weight and efficiency saving right there.
Internal combustion engines are a very poor choice to drive cars really. Limited rev range? Check. (Hence needs gears). Can't run down to zero speed? Check. (Hence needs a clutch). Reciprocating parts require great strength to withstand forces? Check. Needs large and heavy casing to withstand pressures? Check. Fundamental efficiency limited by Carnot Heat Cycle? Check. Electric motors as a means of propulsion is a no-brainer. It's just the damn batteries...
... a 105 degree day...
That's more than the boiling point of water! Wow, where *is*that? With that sort of free energy, you ought to be running for free using steam engines.
Then you're an idiot, if you still think it's equivalent to a gaussian blur. You may not prefer the way fonts are rendered on the Mac, but that's just your opinion. The technical details of what you claimed are how fonts are rendered on the Mac are laughably off the mark.
their idea of text smoothing is to apply Gaussian blur to it and smudge it a bit. They do not use advanced manipulation like clear type does
LOL!! Incorrect. The Mac uses subpixel anti-aliasing just as ClearType does, but it uses a slightly different hinting algorithm. Of the two, the Apple way is probably better subjectively for most people. More info here: Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering and here: Texts Rasterization Exposures
A lot of mediocre programmers seem to complain about Objective-C syntax and Cocoa and whatnot. I can tell you, after 14 years immersed in C++, Cocoa/Objective-C was a breath of fresh air. I picked up the language in about a day and the basics of Cocoa in a few more. Obviously getting really comfortable with it takes a while longer but after doing Cocoa solidly now for 5 years I'd find it very hard to give up. If you've yet to see the advantage then you're probably not doing anything seriously with it. The dynamic dispatch alone simplifies things in a way that C++ can only dream of.
As for MFC, it's a total joke compared to what you can accomplish in Cocoa with a fraction of the code and with a result in another league in terms of stability and quality.
I'm not a rabid fanboi or whatever I'll probably get accused of, but after using a number of languages and frameworks over the years (including developing my own general purpose framework in C++ for Mac) I can tell you that in my experience Cocoa is the best there is right now, and that has been the case for a while.
Creation Science is built around the idea that if you start with the Bible as the source of your hypotheses, you should be able to find scientific evidence that is consistent with those hypotheses. If the evidence instead contradicts your hypothesis, then either your evidence is flawed, your interpretation of the evidence is flawed, or your interpretation of the Bible is flawed.
Ignoring the howling oxymoron with which you open this statement, you also disallow the most obvious interpretation when evidence contradicts your hypothesis: that the hypothesis is wrong. If right out of the gate you are not prepared to accept that possibility, then no matter how you dress it up in disguise, or surround it with fancy pseudo-scientific jargon, it just ain't science.
For instance, what about all of the time and money that is wasted by employees viewing videos on YouTube? That may not necessarily be the equivalent of faulty software; but those videos eat bandwidth and slow PC performance down. That forces corporate IT to make a decision as to whether or not they need to block YouTube on the firewall. If they do that, any legitimate business use of video on YouTube is no longer viable.
If a person chooses to view YouTube instead of doing some work, that's their choice. If there are bad consequences for that person, or time and money lost by his employer, well, the blame rests solely with that person. That's a big difference from software that just crashes without warning, causing some amount of work to be lost, and the time to recover the situation having to be spent. In that case the employee is blameless, but the loser is still him and/or his employer.
Crashes may be relatively rare these days and that's to be welcomed, but there are still delays caused by software problems that really don't need to be there. More attention to quality and stability on the part of the software (and OS) vendors would help.
Star Wars figurines in their pristine presentation boxes are a point of pride and a symbol of an achievement
This is what I don't really get about collecting stuff like this. It' s not an achievement, in any sensible definition of the word. You just bought something that somebody else thought up, designed, got made, marketed and sold. So what? It's just another form of consumerism, and anything so-called "limited edition" is just a device marketers use to tap into this hoarder/collector mentality.
There are some things worth collecting, I've no doubt, but it's usually the "accidentally collectible" stuff that is infinitely more interesting, and to me that almost never includes mass-produced plastic moulded objects.
If Microsoft hadn't been the ones, someone else, or more likely several someone elses, would have. And frankly, chances are good that the state of computing in general would be ahead of where we are without Microsoft, because their monopolistic approach has stifled innovation and competition.
In the early 80s there were plenty of smaller players in the marketplace all with interesting products and different ideas. A more natural outgrowth of that which maintained that balance would have been much healthier. And while that probably would have led to a period of incompatibility and lack of standards, the lack of strong defacto standards may well have created a push for more industry standards earlier. By now many of those things that are still needed (standards for document, and multimedia interchange) would have long been settled.
For all the advantages that computers confer on society, don't forget the huge losses in both time and money that the poor quality of Windows and its apps have caused.
Whoever modded me as "Troll" for posting this below is a fuckwit. This is nothing but a simple statement of fact.
"Every copy of OS X comes with a complete set of developer tools - GCC, Xcode (integrated IDE), Interface Builder, GDB and plenty of other stuff. *If* you're interested in learning to program and you have a Mac, it's all right there in the box."
Hmm, I should have Googled a bit before posting. Elektor is alive and well, I'm happy to report:
;-)
http://www.elektor.com/elektor-uk.35.lynkx
And others:
Everyday Practical Electronics Magazine
Practical Wireless
Electronics World
I realise there are UK mags, but it's what I grew up with and having read a large number of US and Australian publications over the years as well, I believe the UK publications are actually better than the world average. I may be biased however
If I were a magazine publisher, I'd be worried by the fact that apparently no-one has suggested this!
Last time I looked there were still a number of good electronics publications on sale, and I mention them because that's how I got started, back in the day (70s). Back then there were a wide range of mags that covered a similarly wide range of abilities and interests; I expect that's narrowed now, but those that have survived tend to be the better, more in-depth ones. They often cover a lot of theory though of course you probably need to subscribe to a particular title for a year or more to get a complete picture. The advantage though is that they regularly publish interesting and sometimes unusual projects as well as supply the parts in kit form, so you can pick something to build that interests you and fill in the theory as you go.
One of my favourites in the 80s was "Elektor" which I believe was a Dutch publication, though in English. Very high quality production standards of both mag and kits, and they didn't have a patronising tone. Wide range of projects - audio, micros, test gear, RF etc. Lots of theory. No idea if it's still published. Others back then were "Wireless World" (sounded dated even then but excellent mag - emphasis on RF), "Electronics Today International" (ETI) - some great audio and early micro projects, though I'm pretty certain this one isn't published any more, "Practical Wireless" (also RF) and many others aimed more at beginners. Check out your local newsagent - even if you only picked up one they are (or were) a great source of information and suppliers just from the ads alone.
As for Windows or OS X
Every copy of OS X comes with a complete set of developer tools - GCC, Xcode (integrated IDE), Interface Builder, GDB and plenty of other stuff. *If* you're interested in learning to program and you have a Mac, it's all right there in the box.
The fact is, some people are better programmers than others. Trying to find some correlation between the degree of "betterness" and ones gender, or sexual orientation, seems to me quite pointless, since the quality of code is quite impossible to measure objectively. There are certain coding behaviours that are frequently considered "good" and others that are the opposite, but these are largely subjective and often a matter of personal preference.
My view is that some coders don't realise that they are not communicating with a machine when they write code, they are communicating with another human being - even if that person is themselves, at some future time. Those coders who realise this are better at coding than those who are not, which is all you can really say. While this sort of fits with our preconceived notions of what women are supposedly better at than men in general, it's all very wooly and unscientific. I bet the author of this "study" cherry-picked data to support the argument, which is not doing science.
Feeling insecure chaps? (The parent post too). Pathetic.
The text is quoting from the original article, which was aimed at business users. Seems reasonable to add the explanation to me.
I remember in vivid detail that afternoon when I first connected two interconnects comprised of two TESLA Tricon geometries in parallel. [...] This was major improvement in an area that I did not think could be improved upon.
Then I also remembered, I'd spent the night in an acid den and was totally off my head. It was the green-spotted pink snakes emanating from the left speaker that finally tipped me off that it wasn't the cables after all.
...is there ever going to be an OS XI?
Yes, and they're going to start a whole new series of code-names based not on big cats, but fictional rock bands. The first of these is the Mac OS XI "Spinal Tap".
I disagree - the brain is better understood than the mind, at present. Both are understood poorly overall though. But since the brain is the only obtainable physical object that actually implements intelligence, it's all we have to study.
I'm not sure that it will ever be possible to get to a complete understanding of mind/intelligence even if we have a complete model of the physical brain. It's like taking a memory dump of a computer and trying to reverse engineer the source code of the operating system and all of its applications and stored data, when all you have are billions of 1s and 0s and nothing to tell you what the instruction set is, let alone how data structures are organised and so on. This would be almost impossible with today's ordinary computers, which are vastly simpler and dumber than a brain and whose underlying principles are fully understood. The sheer size of this task suggests we may never be able to fathom it, though that's not to say it's not worth trying.
Write a simple c or c++ hello_word program
On the other hand, try this. Create a new project in Xcode. Open mainmenu.nib in Interface Builder. Drag an NSTextView to a window, save, compile, run. Result - a complete functional word processor. You can even type "hello world" into it if you want.
Fuckwit.
Sorry bro, I'm into computers... Not toys
1986 called... it wants its playground chant back.
would a recent Simpson's movie have been unviewable
Many people thought so.
Also, haven't they ever heard of the phrase "lala-land" to mean somebody who's crazy? Somehow appropriate... but possibly not the best name they could have chosen.
I think Britain is a hugely underrated country, and living away for 7 years made me appreciate it so much more, and the Aussies are right - whining poms!
;-) Australia isn't perfect and there are aspects of Britain I really do appreciate. However, food in supermarkets in Australia is much cheaper, fresher, with more variety, still largely seasonal, travelled generally less far and is in much greater proportion to ready meals. Last time I visited a Tesco in the UK (admittedly at Christmas time) I could hardly find any real food - half the store was "seasonal goods" (and what the hell are Tesco doing selling tellys?) and what was left of the food section seemed to be 60% pre-packed or pre-cooked (pre-grated cheese? I mean, WTF??? How hard is it to grate cheese!). Some food in the UK is now universally so awful (yes Bacon, I'm looking at you) that many people have probably never experienced what the real thing tastes like. (Hint: go to a proper farmer's market and find out.)
The Aussies only complain about us whinging (not whining) if it's about Australia. Knocking Britain is fine
The other thing that's better in Britain is the beer, whatever an Aussie might try to claim otherwise. Which is an interesting point, because at one time, beer looked to be utterly fucked. Thanks to CAMRA you can now find decent beer almost everywhere, so it proves that grass-roots movements can achieve things. So maybe there is hope - Brits just need to start caring about their food, their health and their political representatives as much as they have shown they cared about their beer!
I should think they ought to give me a guest spot on "Grumpy Old Men" at this rate. Which is another bloody thing, reality TV..........
There is a lot of space here that's completely empty
Well, surely that depends on your definition of "empty". Try the Australian bush, that's empty. I enjoy country walks in Britain, but I can honestly say that unless you go trespassing on private land (or own a lot of it) then you literally cannot go anywhere without bumping into someone. Seriously - try finding a quiet spot to have outdoor sex in Britain! (Unless you're the exhibitionist type, you are likely to give up in frustration). I realise that's not quite your point, but I don't think filling up all space in between the overcrowded towns is really the answer, is it?