Do they still have black vans driving around with tv-detector dishes sticking out the roof?
Yes and no. There are still detector vans but the equipment has got a lot smaller, more sensitive and even portable. So the fact that a van is in the area is not as much of a giveaway as it once was. The vans are not run by the BBC, but a completely separate government agency.
Personally while I think the license fee approach is a good one - it really does seem to raise quality well above what the "free market" delivers, the enforcing of the payment by the licensing authority leaves a lot to be desired. They are possibly the most "big brother" like of all of the govt, with quite unpleasant tactics and attitude. It borders on the facistic.... they assume that everyone has a TV set, so you have to prove you DON'T have one in order for them to leave you alone. Ever tried to prove a negative? Also, they have automatic right of entry to your home without a warrant, though only to search for a TV set. They send you very strongly worded authoritarian and intimidating letters to make you pay, especially if you have no record of payment because you don't have a TV set.. the list goes on. A really pretty unpleasant bunch of people.
NOTE - never use the term "energy source" when referring to hydrogen because it only carries energy that has to come from somewhere else
True. But photosynthesis is a very efficient way of storing solar radiation as a hydrocarbon, and is totally renewable. If we grew fuel as we needed it instead of digging up previously sequestered stuff it would be carbon neutral, as well as providing a lucrative new form of agriculture. With genetic engineering we could probably bio-engineer a plant that was particularly suitable for fuel production, so that the amount of additional processing beyond harvesting was minimised. Surely it's got to be worth looking into?
Neanderthals disappeared for the same reason that e.g. Australian Aboriginals are disappearaing, and that is the bad behaviour of human beings. They were no doubt treated badly, prejudiced against and hunted to extinction because they were "different", but unlike other animals were not so different that they were not perceived as a threat. It's been the same story ever since with every minority race, so a different species of human stood no chance at all.
Sad to say but I think most people don't actually know what pronouns and possessives are. On the other hand slashdot readers might "get it" if it's presented as a simple pseudo-code like statement:
Webster came before any British attempt to make a dictionary
Wasn't it Dr. Johnson in 1660-something who attempted to compile the first English dictionary?
Of course English spelling (and much grammar) is braindead, but the reforms do not improve it really. Unfortunately all attempts so far to create a truly rational, orthogonal, regular language for natural speaking have met with failure. Esperanto is not a bad attempt, but it just hasn't caught on. Like biological systems, languages are inherently ad-hoc, and simply evolve to suit the needs of their users. As such most attempts at spelling reform are pointless, and one might say, that attempts to get internet users not to use "it's" when they almost always mean "its" is doomed too - but what I don't understand is why the grasp of such a simple rule eludes so many people.
Ignore that last comment - I get it now. It's very hard to follow the thread of a conversation when bits of it just get pushed out of sight at random. What remains often doesn't make sense or reads in the exact OPPOSITE sense to that intended, which is what happened there.
I see you were defending the english spelling now, not attacking it!;-) It's amazing that Americans don't realise (realize?) that our way of spelling predates their braindead version, and of course is the CORRECT way to spell.
for ALL OTHER USES, there is no apostrophe in 'its'
Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule.
IQ tests are meaningless because they don't have any basis in any observable metric, and probably favour certain kinds of abilities which may or may not have anything to do with "intelligence", whatever that is. Furthermore, they are entirely self-referential, since the 'benchmark' of 100 is merely the median 'value' retruned by a sample population doing the self-same tests. So all you're measuring is your relative ablity to do thesekinds of tests.
Also, if we ever encounter aliens and they give us the REAL objective, universal IQ test, I bet we won't be very good at it...
a fallacy that all Mac apps are magically faster because the chip has AltiVec
Not a complete fallacy since there is plenty of OS code that does use AltiVec when it's available, and this code is commonly used by nearly all apps (i.e. graphics rendering and so on).
I agree with the gist of your post, but it was perhaps not quite as bad a picture on the Mac as you paint it:
ie. relying on the frontmost app to nicely make calls to yield().
In fact the call in question was GetNextEvent(), which is what every application relied on to get its events, so as long as apps were written around the event model (and had to be, if they had any sort of GUI) then they would co-operate automatically. It was still quite easy to make a CPU hog if you wanted to, but on the whole this approached worked fairly well.
On System 7.5, you had to manually set how much memory an application was supposed to get. If you guessed wrong, tough
You didn't have to - application developers preset a sensible amount. If you decided to fiddle with it, then the only way you would end up in the situation you describe is by setting a figure LESS than the developers recommended minimum, which surely is a case of user stupidity? Some apps benefited from higher numbers when working on more complex data, but "guessing"? Nope, the idea was to work out the amount you NEEDED, within the amount of physical RAM available. I agree it wasn't nice and it wasn't pretty, but if you knew what you were doing, it sort of worked out OK most of the time. Also, apps shouldn't have died with an "out of memory" error - they might refuse to open more windows or open the 200 GB file you were trying to open, but they shouldn't die. I know mine didn't - I wrote them properly. But I agree that many were not so great in this respect.
One thing you got dead right though - OS X is infinitely better in every respect in both the multitasking and memory management areas.
You can't fly the concord at full speed over the continental united states
Is this reallythe case? What exactly is it about a gentle rumble of distant thunder that people find so objectionable? The scare stories about a trail of broken windows and burst eardrums is bullshit. SST flights across land are banned only because of politics - the US would have allowed it if it was their bird that was up there doing it. Military low-level supersonic flights on the other hand, well that's quite another story.
Aussie speed cameras have a far more obvious flaw than the MD5 thing. They only take one photograph, so there is no way to independently measure the speed that the car was travelling. In the UK, speed cameras take two pictures, and the roads have fixed calibration markings painted on them in front of the camera. It's a simple matter to corroborate the speed that the camera says you were doing by simply measuring the distance the car has travelled between the two pictures (presumably the timing of the pictures is also independently verifiable). I believe the UK introduced this after a case was succesfully beaten by someone claiming that a single photograph could not prove he was speeding, as the calibration of the camera was not verifiable. I'm surprised that no-one has tried this defence in Australia.
Good point, but it's "hypocrites", not "Hippocrates", who was an ancient Greek responsible for the establishment of the Hippocratic Oath. One Good, the other Bad.
Thus I'm rather surprised that you think most good programmers are terrible teachers
Did I say that - well, maybe I meant many rather than most. But being a good teracher isn't just about depth of understanding, on which point I agreee with you - it's also about attitude. How often have you come up against the self-proclaimed "guru" at a software firm who likes to wield power by deliberately withholding his knowledge? Or who thinks he's doing you a favour by getting you "to work it out for yourself", with a knowing twinkle in his eye? Good teachers are also those who WANT to share their knowledge, and don't feel threatened by "giving it away". That eliminates probably half of the good programmers I've met, who really were good programmers and didn't need to be so insecure...
I fully take your point; perhaps my analogy could have been better thought out. Of course I don't just mean the code, I mean the overall design, the user interface, the aesthetics... all aspects of software design of which only a part can be engineered. Getting it all right is hard - in fact there are very few non-trivial applications out there that are not flawed in one way or another. In fact I can't name one.
However I stick by my main point, which is that good software is a craft, and craftsmen count. Whether you apply that craftsmanship at the design stage or the coding stage is not so important as the fact that you do it, somewhere. Is the designer going to specify the exact set of objects that are required to implement a design? Their interfaces? Or is it sketched out and the details filled in by the implementor? Like Rembrandt, he might give the work of filling in much of the detail to his students, but the result is still undeniably a Rembrandt - but the student also must have great artistic ability. In reality the designer rarely goes into that much detail, whatever might be considered best practise. The user may not care about the architecture, but if it's wrong, chances are it will be noticed, in terms of awkward usability, lack of functionality, slowness, etc
I fully agree with your last paragraph, but even with all of those things applied, the result could be an appalling mess if everyone involved is not good at what they do. Making the engineering really work requires craftsmen (and women, of course).
I have always seen software "engineering" as a craft, done by craftsmen. There are too many unfixed aspects to be able to really call it engineering or a science. Of course it has elements of those, but it also has elements of art, and that's what makes it a craft. And just as there are wonderful craftsmen who can create a masterpiece of a beautiful chair from wood, there are factories turning out cheap Ikea furniture by the ton. Both might be perfectly functional in terms of parking one's botttom, but in a hundred years time no-one will be seeking out Ikea chairs in antique shops.
Software is much the same. A true craftsmen of the art will produce code that is so tight, so functional and so spare that it is nothing short of beautiful. When was the last time you made something beautiful? We all get the warm fuzzies from time to time when we think we've done good work, but how can you really tell?
My view is that software engineering courses are all very well (not exactly a waste of time), but they might perhaps be the wrong way to turn out good programmers. Perhaps something more like the traditional apprenticeship would serve better - mentoring by someone who is already a craftsman "well versed in the art". I guess the main drawback of this is that most good programmers are often terrible teachers, but that might reflect the lack of a tradition in the field.
The review remarks that Photoshop doesn't do diagonal scrolling, but goes horizontal or vertical alternately. I wonder if this is a Carbon/Cocoa thing? In Cocoa, the scroll wheel event is a single event, with both horizontal and vertical deltas sent simultaneously, and NSScrollView presumably works off both at the same time. In Carbon, scroll wheel events have separate H and V parameters and given the legacy of how scrolling is traditionally implemented, it probably can only do one or the other at a time. This might be something to watch out for if your favourite apps are Carbon, though to me the advantages of diagonal scrolling are not really all that compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they still have black vans driving around with tv-detector dishes sticking out the roof?
Yes and no. There are still detector vans but the equipment has got a lot smaller, more sensitive and even portable. So the fact that a van is in the area is not as much of a giveaway as it once was. The vans are not run by the BBC, but a completely separate government agency.
Personally while I think the license fee approach is a good one - it really does seem to raise quality well above what the "free market" delivers, the enforcing of the payment by the licensing authority leaves a lot to be desired. They are possibly the most "big brother" like of all of the govt, with quite unpleasant tactics and attitude. It borders on the facistic.... they assume that everyone has a TV set, so you have to prove you DON'T have one in order for them to leave you alone. Ever tried to prove a negative? Also, they have automatic right of entry to your home without a warrant, though only to search for a TV set. They send you very strongly worded authoritarian and intimidating letters to make you pay, especially if you have no record of payment because you don't have a TV set.. the list goes on. A really pretty unpleasant bunch of people.
I could care less about any 'restrictions
How much less could you care? We need to know!
Even people on Slashdot are more literate
;-)
No they're not. Let's not get carried away...
NOTE - never use the term "energy source" when referring to hydrogen because it only carries energy that has to come from somewhere else
True. But photosynthesis is a very efficient way of storing solar radiation as a hydrocarbon, and is totally renewable. If we grew fuel as we needed it instead of digging up previously sequestered stuff it would be carbon neutral, as well as providing a lucrative new form of agriculture. With genetic engineering we could probably bio-engineer a plant that was particularly suitable for fuel production, so that the amount of additional processing beyond harvesting was minimised. Surely it's got to be worth looking into?
so much so that the SA-80 now using its own type of 5.56mm ammunition
:)
Yep, it's actually 5.55mm, problem solved...
You can't really make the argument against ID plainer than this. I highly recommend everyone to read it, whatever you believe:
Guardian article
Neanderthals disappeared for the same reason that e.g. Australian Aboriginals are disappearaing, and that is the bad behaviour of human beings. They were no doubt treated badly, prejudiced against and hunted to extinction because they were "different", but unlike other animals were not so different that they were not perceived as a threat. It's been the same story ever since with every minority race, so a different species of human stood no chance at all.
Sad to say but I think most people don't actually know what pronouns and possessives are. On the other hand slashdot readers might "get it" if it's presented as a simple pseudo-code like statement:
if ("it is"||"it has") then
substitute(it's)
else
print(its)
Webster came before any British attempt to make a dictionary
Wasn't it Dr. Johnson in 1660-something who attempted to compile the first English dictionary?
Of course English spelling (and much grammar) is braindead, but the reforms do not improve it really. Unfortunately all attempts so far to create a truly rational, orthogonal, regular language for natural speaking have met with failure. Esperanto is not a bad attempt, but it just hasn't caught on. Like biological systems, languages are inherently ad-hoc, and simply evolve to suit the needs of their users. As such most attempts at spelling reform are pointless, and one might say, that attempts to get internet users not to use "it's" when they almost always mean "its" is doomed too - but what I don't understand is why the grasp of such a simple rule eludes so many people.
Ignore that last comment - I get it now. It's very hard to follow the thread of a conversation when bits of it just get pushed out of sight at random. What remains often doesn't make sense or reads in the exact OPPOSITE sense to that intended, which is what happened there.
;-) It's amazing that Americans don't realise (realize?) that our way of spelling predates their braindead version, and of course is the CORRECT way to spell.
I see you were defending the english spelling now, not attacking it!
That's how the english spell favour. It's their freakin' language, you should learn it
Yes, that is how the english spell favour. I am english, that's how I spell it. Your point is...?
C'mon, it's really simple:
::= "it is" | "it has"
it's
for ALL OTHER USES, there is no apostrophe in 'its'
Surely this simple rule isn't beyond the tech-heads here? For those of us that care about English this is as jarring a syntax error as anything that would barf a compiler. So do our parsers a favour and LEARN this simple rule.
IQ tests are meaningless because they don't have any basis in any observable metric, and probably favour certain kinds of abilities which may or may not have anything to do with "intelligence", whatever that is. Furthermore, they are entirely self-referential, since the 'benchmark' of 100 is merely the median 'value' retruned by a sample population doing the self-same tests. So all you're measuring is your relative ablity to do thesekinds of tests.
Also, if we ever encounter aliens and they give us the REAL objective, universal IQ test, I bet we won't be very good at it...
a fallacy that all Mac apps are magically faster because the chip has AltiVec
Not a complete fallacy since there is plenty of OS code that does use AltiVec when it's available, and this code is commonly used by nearly all apps (i.e. graphics rendering and so on).
I agree with the gist of your post, but it was perhaps not quite as bad a picture on the Mac as you paint it:
ie. relying on the frontmost app to nicely make calls to yield().
In fact the call in question was GetNextEvent(), which is what every application relied on to get its events, so as long as apps were written around the event model (and had to be, if they had any sort of GUI) then they would co-operate automatically. It was still quite easy to make a CPU hog if you wanted to, but on the whole this approached worked fairly well.
On System 7.5, you had to manually set how much memory an application was supposed to get. If you guessed wrong, tough
You didn't have to - application developers preset a sensible amount. If you decided to fiddle with it, then the only way you would end up in the situation you describe is by setting a figure LESS than the developers recommended minimum, which surely is a case of user stupidity? Some apps benefited from higher numbers when working on more complex data, but "guessing"? Nope, the idea was to work out the amount you NEEDED, within the amount of physical RAM available. I agree it wasn't nice and it wasn't pretty, but if you knew what you were doing, it sort of worked out OK most of the time. Also, apps shouldn't have died with an "out of memory" error - they might refuse to open more windows or open the 200 GB file you were trying to open, but they shouldn't die. I know mine didn't - I wrote them properly. But I agree that many were not so great in this respect.
One thing you got dead right though - OS X is infinitely better in every respect in both the multitasking and memory management areas.
APES EVOLVED FROM HUMANS
So it's only logical that you made one of them president!!
You can't fly the concord at full speed over the continental united states
Is this reallythe case? What exactly is it about a gentle rumble of distant thunder that people find so objectionable? The scare stories about a trail of broken windows and burst eardrums is bullshit. SST flights across land are banned only because of politics - the US would have allowed it if it was their bird that was up there doing it. Military low-level supersonic flights on the other hand, well that's quite another story.
Aussie speed cameras have a far more obvious flaw than the MD5 thing. They only take one photograph, so there is no way to independently measure the speed that the car was travelling. In the UK, speed cameras take two pictures, and the roads have fixed calibration markings painted on them in front of the camera. It's a simple matter to corroborate the speed that the camera says you were doing by simply measuring the distance the car has travelled between the two pictures (presumably the timing of the pictures is also independently verifiable). I believe the UK introduced this after a case was succesfully beaten by someone claiming that a single photograph could not prove he was speeding, as the calibration of the camera was not verifiable. I'm surprised that no-one has tried this defence in Australia.
Good point, but it's "hypocrites", not "Hippocrates", who was an ancient Greek responsible for the establishment of the Hippocratic Oath. One Good, the other Bad.
If the kind of world they wished to see actually existed, computers, DVDs and the internet etc just couldn't exist. Think 11th century.
Simple, really.
Thus I'm rather surprised that you think most good programmers are terrible teachers
Did I say that - well, maybe I meant many rather than most. But being a good teracher isn't just about depth of understanding, on which point I agreee with you - it's also about attitude. How often have you come up against the self-proclaimed "guru" at a software firm who likes to wield power by deliberately withholding his knowledge? Or who thinks he's doing you a favour by getting you "to work it out for yourself", with a knowing twinkle in his eye? Good teachers are also those who WANT to share their knowledge, and don't feel threatened by "giving it away". That eliminates probably half of the good programmers I've met, who really were good programmers and didn't need to be so insecure...
I fully take your point; perhaps my analogy could have been better thought out. Of course I don't just mean the code, I mean the overall design, the user interface, the aesthetics... all aspects of software design of which only a part can be engineered. Getting it all right is hard - in fact there are very few non-trivial applications out there that are not flawed in one way or another. In fact I can't name one.
However I stick by my main point, which is that good software is a craft, and craftsmen count. Whether you apply that craftsmanship at the design stage or the coding stage is not so important as the fact that you do it, somewhere. Is the designer going to specify the exact set of objects that are required to implement a design? Their interfaces? Or is it sketched out and the details filled in by the implementor? Like Rembrandt, he might give the work of filling in much of the detail to his students, but the result is still undeniably a Rembrandt - but the student also must have great artistic ability. In reality the designer rarely goes into that much detail, whatever might be considered best practise. The user may not care about the architecture, but if it's wrong, chances are it will be noticed, in terms of awkward usability, lack of functionality, slowness, etc
I fully agree with your last paragraph, but even with all of those things applied, the result could be an appalling mess if everyone involved is not good at what they do. Making the engineering really work requires craftsmen (and women, of course).
I have always seen software "engineering" as a craft, done by craftsmen. There are too many unfixed aspects to be able to really call it engineering or a science. Of course it has elements of those, but it also has elements of art, and that's what makes it a craft. And just as there are wonderful craftsmen who can create a masterpiece of a beautiful chair from wood, there are factories turning out cheap Ikea furniture by the ton. Both might be perfectly functional in terms of parking one's botttom, but in a hundred years time no-one will be seeking out Ikea chairs in antique shops.
Software is much the same. A true craftsmen of the art will produce code that is so tight, so functional and so spare that it is nothing short of beautiful. When was the last time you made something beautiful? We all get the warm fuzzies from time to time when we think we've done good work, but how can you really tell?
My view is that software engineering courses are all very well (not exactly a waste of time), but they might perhaps be the wrong way to turn out good programmers. Perhaps something more like the traditional apprenticeship would serve better - mentoring by someone who is already a craftsman "well versed in the art". I guess the main drawback of this is that most good programmers are often terrible teachers, but that might reflect the lack of a tradition in the field.
The review remarks that Photoshop doesn't do diagonal scrolling, but goes horizontal or vertical alternately. I wonder if this is a Carbon/Cocoa thing? In Cocoa, the scroll wheel event is a single event, with both horizontal and vertical deltas sent simultaneously, and NSScrollView presumably works off both at the same time. In Carbon, scroll wheel events have separate H and V parameters and given the legacy of how scrolling is traditionally implemented, it probably can only do one or the other at a time. This might be something to watch out for if your favourite apps are Carbon, though to me the advantages of diagonal scrolling are not really all that compelling.