You are right that making an arbitrary-length routine would not have been sloppy - but given the way the contest works, getting the solution done in the fastest possible time gets you a larger score, and there are more problems given than you can solve in the time allotted, so people wouldn't bother - espeically in a language like Pascal (not my choice, but the other chioce was C and one of the team memners didn't know C) where making dynamic-length arrays is against the religiuously typecast nature of the language.
So, the point is, that the ones who did it fast all did it the fixed-length way, and in THAT, it is sloppy to just make a gigantic array.
I would assume you bothered to check your program against the maximum input (to check for time factors).
Of course. And if you read my post, you'd know that the givens as to how large the "maximum input" was was precisely where the mistake in the givens was. I did test for the maximum case they claimed the test data would contiain. But that claim was false.
You also forgot to mention that the three or four team members get to SHARE one computer. So, it's not only important to be able to solve problems quickly, it's also about managing the limited resources at your disposal.
I didn't forget. It was just irrelevant to my point.
Some tasks are still slow no matter how fast a computer is. If I'm rendering a raytraced scene then it *always* takes longer than I'd like it to, even if on my newer computer it takes 2 minutes instead of the 10 minutes it used to take. IN that situation, I don't want wasted cycles.
Besides, there's also a visibility issue. I like to SEE what's behind the window I'm moving. It gives me a better idea where I want to drop it off. Now, transluscent windows might be worth the wasted clock cycles, but opaque ones are not because not only do they take more time, they are also less useful.
Whenever *I* see someone say wasted clock cycles are no big deal, *I* think, "there's someone who payed too much for his computer, because he's clearly got a more powerful computer than his usage calls for."
This approach works well when you know up front what is possible. It doesn't work as well when you are exploring new territory and making a program of a type nobody has made before - you are almost guaranteed to discover in the process of actually getting it to work that the way you originally envisioned it would behave is just not the right way to do it after all.
Only when the mistake is made to make bells and whistles mandatory. Becuase of that decision, Gnome will never be used in something like a PDA.
I don't like wasting clock cycles on something pointless, like sending hundreds of redraw requests to a window that I'm resizing. Even on my 2.6 Ghz machine with a Radeon 9000 graphics card, I *still* use outline dragging becuase those 2.6 Ghz would be better spent on something else.
Good job to all who participated. This thing is *hard* because, while the problems are not insurmountable, you are only give 5 hours to do as many of them as you can. It's a contest in how good you are at predicting where the difficulty in the problem lays, and nailing that problem right away. Some of the problems look deceptively simple. It's the ones that immediately notice what it is about them that's not simple that do well.
Way back when, I got to participate in one of these as an undergrad (it was 1994, if my memory is right). I've still got a little bit of a bitter memory over that one because a mistake in the givens of a problem caused our team to lose one of the problems - one which we would have gotten a HUGE score on otherwise. (Because it was done 'right'* in just 30 minutes, and your score is based on how much clock time was left after your solution is accepted.) (And that year the problems were really hard such that the winning team only got 3 of 7 done - they had accidentally given the undergrads the contest that was supposed to be for the grads - so missing one problem is a huge difference.)
* - But what was wrong with it was based entirely on a misprint in the problems presented to us. The problem involved calculating big factorial numbers (among a few other things). The trick was to realize that no computer had a native number format that could store 300 factorial, and so you had to invent your own string-of-digits number primative that could handle N digits and multiply two numbers - given that N could be in the thousands - it's a simple problem, but the trick is to realize it is necessary to make up your own primitive. I realized it right away and wrote up the number primitive in a few minutes. But there was a problem - the givens in the problem description guaranteed that the test input will contain no factorials that result in more than FOO digits, where FOO was something in th 5,000's. This was the misprint - the biggest test they used actually contained something like FOO+200 digits, where FOO was in the 5,000's. There was no good way to check this given, since to do so required that we have a large-number multiplying routine - which is what this program was all about in the first place - which is why they gave it to you as a given. So when I allocated an array of size FOO+1 (for some overhead), my program kept crashing. Those people who got sloppy and didn't try to be efficient and just made a huge array of size 10,000 had their programs work just fine on the first attempt. Those people that tried believing the given in the problem had programs crashing. And the nature of the test environment was that we couldn't see our programs' responses to the test data, and the test results weren't allowed to tell us what really happened when the program was run - just that "program terminated prematurely.", and that's it - no information about the data that caused this, and no indication of where the program died. In our own tests everything worked fine because we weren't trying numbers larger than the givens PROMISED us the test data needed, but when the solution was submitted, the test data tried larger numbers than the given promised would be used, and thus the program crashed.
I only know what happened because an announcement was made 4 hours and 30 minutes into the contest that there was a misprint and then the correction was given. Then I changed the size of the array, resubmitted, and it was right, after too many penalty points for failed submissions, and 4 hours of points wasted on THEIR mistake. Yeah, I'm still a bit bitter, because their attitude was that the contest was allegedly still "fair" because everyone had the same misprint on their handouts, and scores would not be adjusted for this mistake. I called "bullshit" because some people hadn't even tried that problem and therefore were unaffected by its misprint, and people who had been sloppy and picked a huge array were also unaffected by the misprint.
I think that what interfaces truly need are simple rules that can be quickly learned, from which one can intuit the more complex details.
If that's what they wanted, they would't lambast the 'vi' interface as the worst text editor experience. Vi is very simple, and quickly learned, and the simple rules build to make more complex ones (for example, if 'foo' is the command to move the cursor to a spot, then 'd' followed by 'foo' is the command to delete that section and shove it in the default buffer.) But people don't want to be able to intuit complex tasks from how the simpler ones work - becuase basically they don't want the 'tree' of learning that that approach creates. They want *all* tasks to be simple in a flat model with no heirarchy. They really hate it when foo doesn't make sense until after you've already learned bar. This is why they hate tools like vi, while programmers love it.
If you know you're going to be using a program a LOT, then the best UI is one that favors long-term application of your learning more so than short-term. If you're only going to be using it occasionally, then the best UI is the one that favors short-term learning more so than long-term application of your learning.
The problem is that short-term and long-term learning of a tool are often in conflict and cannot both be optimized. Hence you end up with the big fights over what counts as a "good" user interface - where the programmers and the end users can't agree because they don't have the same needs.
That's why the ideal situation is to have open standards for file formats - then the same file can be used by a simple end-user tool and by a complex tool, and each side can use what they want and be happy.
Having a window system that can work quickly on low quality hardware is not just a 'pet quirk'. And gnome threw that away by making the one and only one choice be the choice that is more computationally expensive.
I understand the impetus behind restricting the choices. I don't understand why the lowest common denominator wasn't what was used.
Every braile pad I've seen on an ATM has been a plastic add-on sticker - a sheet that eventually ends up peeling off on the corners with wear. That doesn't sound like something that's manufactured into the machine. It's something slapped onto it afterward, and therefore NO it doesn't make it cheaper to make all machines with it.
Well, it's often very hard for people to remember what it was like to think before having all the knowlege they do now. I find it admirable that you recognise this problem and admit to it (I probably do it too, everyone does). It's one of the problems experts who teach often have - it's one thing to know a lot, but its really hard to try to pave a path that somoene else can follow that leads them to the same knowlege. One big problem is that teachers have a hard time remembering how things looked to themselves back when they didn't already have all the same information.
As far as word-of-mouth evidence, there's a real problem when it's written down by someone other than the person speaking. (Even if you accept that Jesus existed as described in the bible, that would mean that Jesus never wrote anything down, as the bible accounts all come from other people. It would have been easier if there was a book that said, "Hi, my name is Jesus, let me tell you what I did today...".) So that immediately makes me suspicious as to the veracity of the words being put in his mouth. (Why wasn't the alleged Son Of God even literate - seems like an oversight.)
A lot of people trying to support the veracity of the New Testament bring up how court trials accept eyewitness testimony, so why can't we? Well, this view ignores the fact taht courts DON'T accept secondhand hearsay testimony, and that's what the bible is, even if its an accurate writing down of what the disciples said - becuase THEY were reporting what Jesus allegedly said. When person X gets on the stand and says that person Y said such-and-such happened, that's not acceptable evidence. Courts only accept one level of indirection in the witness testimony.
The funny thing is that you apparently think there's something wrong with that mentality. If two systems have equal quality, and one is an expensive product and the other is being made in people's spare time for no charge, that says something pretty bad about the expensive product.
I worked for them for a grand total of 3 months. I only took up the job because there was another local company I wanted to work for, which only hired contractors, and Keane was one of the main ones they used, and my skillset matched up so exactly to that other company that I figured I'd have a good chance to get into it after a little time 'in the trenches'.
I found out after hiring on that Keane had actually just lost that contract with the company I wanted to work for, and the few people they still had there were being extricated one by one as their projects finished.
So I got shoved off into a corner writing unix C/SQL query library routines of the form "do this exact query, just like it's described here, and stick the results in these variables, and then return them - no, don't ask what these queries do." It was for a local Telco. The work was dull, but the pay was good. But it only lasted about 2 months. I was a bit worried that despite being the new guy on the project (of three people) that I knew more about the technical aspects of the programming environment than the people who were already on the project. I knew how to run the dbx debugger, for example. No, seriously - nobody else knew how to do that - they were saying "I thought unix doesn't have debuggers.." Understandable for an end-user, but these guys were writing code......shudder...
I sat "on the bench" after that because I didn't have the skillset that matched their contracts. Their contracts were all visual basic and some old mainfraime MVS stuff. They claimed there was no demand anymore for someone who knew unix/c/c++/perl/ and so on. (I suspect they just didn't have the ability to convince companies in that line of work to use their consultants.) They said I should learn VB while waiting. I offerred to learn Java instead, which they accepted because it was a new buzzword at the time.
Then they gave me some kind of nationalized standard skills test they have in C. They figured they could check if maybe some other city had good work that would match.
They said I scored higher than anyone in their branch ever had before.
I got scared. I know I flubbed up a few things on that test. I know I only did "okay" on it - probably somewhere around 85% correct. But if that's the best they had, then that means their reputation among places trying to hire C programmers would be awful and I'd never get good contracts with them.
As I was contemplating quitting, they said they had an opening in Mineappolis (about a 6 hour drive away), and that it needed someone with C and unix experience. While it was a matter of maintenence rather than development, they were trying to migrate from an old system to a new one and needed someone who could understand the old one to help. While not the greatest job, it still sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try.
So, a week later, living out of suitcases in Keane's furnished apartment in Minneapolis, I started my first day on the job....which turned out to have nothing to do with my skills at all. there was no C. There was no Unix. There was no SQL. The old system they were migrating from was OS/2. The program was rexx scripts. The job was not to migrate the program at all, but to just babysit it and watch the output logs for errors until the new system came online. They lied to me. Plain and simple. They lied about what the job entailed when they said it needed a person with C/unix skills. I asked the local guy what else will the assignment entail after this portion is over - of watching the program and reporting errors - he said, that's it. That *is* the assignment. I was not involved in the migration. I was not involved in programming anything at all.
Two days later I'd found another job over the internet (a job I still am happily staying with 6 years later) and had quit Keane.
There was no excuse for their practice of
(1) lying to me about what the job entailed.
(2) sending me off far away when they do it, probably under the hope that I'd roll over and take it since I'd be so far removed from my support network for job hunting.
The problem is that the U.S. doesn't have it's own top level domain that gets used much. You see lots of sites ending in.uk, or.fr, or.au, and so on, but not a whole lot ending in.us - instead the US sites just use the main original heirarchy of.com,.org,.net,.edu, and so on - which unfortunately a lot of other countries also use. There is no guarantee that a non-usa site will end in a country TLD, and so no guarantee that a.com or.org address is or is not in the US.
In this case, it's being used in the same sense as it's literal technical definition. It's not being used in a buzzwordy way. I use the word "disambiguate" all the time. I write parsers.
Those who really do watch all 395 channels will pay more.
Those who really do watch all 395 channels must be living in an alternate universe where there's more time per week. Even if a viewer is awake 24 hours a day, for 7 days a week, and does nothing but watch TV, and needs to watch all 395 channels in a week, then he's watching each channel for only about 25 minutes.
When studying any sort of controversial claim about an event that allegedly happened, only the ones that believe it to be true bother looking at the evidece for a long length of time. The skeptics stop bothering once they see enough problems to repudate their skepticism. Therefore your point about how those that are skeptical haven't spent as long on it as you have is technically true, but doesn't lead to the conclusion you are trying to make it lead to. It doesn't mean their claims are less informed. It means their claims don't require nearly as much evidence - once they had what they needed, they stopped. The believer, on the other hand, doesn't stop at just looking at it enough to make him think it's true. Once he's done that, he's got a lot more to study about all the details of the event.
In other words, I doubt that out of those years you spent studying the event, that they were all spent on the issue of whether or not it happened. I'd guess that most of that time was spent on what the consequences of that event happeneing would be, after you believed it happened.
The resserection has no evidence that is not word-of-mouth. If you believe word of mouth to be acceptable evidence, then you can study further into the issue. If you don't then you're done, and you don't spend years on it.
Sorry. I sit corrected. (I was used to hearing of a system consisting of throttle and cyclic, not a system with fixed-speed blades using a collective and cylcic, and therefore thought of "throttle" as the lifting controller and "that c-word I can't remember" as the tilt control. I didn't realize that new systems use TWO "c-words I can't remember".)
I installed OO on one place at work. Multiple people are using it from different workstations, no problem. But that's because I'm using an OS that was designed with that kind of usage pattern in mind from the beginning, not one for which it was an afterthought. Someone who wants to run OO on their workstation either runs it off of the shared NFS drive, or runs it through remote X-windows. This took no effort at all to set up. It just works by default.
There was a problem with the install, though, that has nothing to do with network versus personal use - if you have a bad font file installed somewhere in your system, Open office's installer crashes becasue it tries to read all the fonts in the system with it's own font rendering library (instead of using the one in the windows server) before it gets to the last one in the path, which is the one it actually uses in the installer. If any of the truetype fonts are corrupt (which can happen if you got them from a download), it never gets far enough along to read the font it wants to use for installing.
That's a huge problem, but it's been fixed in the open beta version, by giving the installer a fallback font to use that's ugly but guaranteed to work, when the font it wants to use is not working. (I would prefer a fix that just stops trying to use it's own font engine altogether and just uses the one that is in the x server, since they can all handle truetype fonts well now - and the only reason for OO having its own font renderer is now moot.)
By default, Outlook blocks users from opening any attachments whereas Mozilla doesn't - which e-mail client is most at risk from an e-mail borne virus?
The one designed to run on Windows, with maybe Mac thrown in as an afterthought. The one designed to run cross-platform doesn't have as many hooks that are used to mess up your system.
Since it wasn't more than a bunch of assertions, that's kind of sad that you don't think you can do it better. Larry's comments that you pasted would only serve to convince those who are already convinced to begin with. Oh well.
I believe through faith, but I don't see how the absence of God changes this in the slightest.
If there's no discernable difference between a hypothetical universe in which your god does exist from a hypothetical one in which your god doesn't, then your god's existance is irrelevant.
[Followed by some claims that don't contradict what I said.]
Anything contradictory would be long gone by now.
Nope - there is a large collection of these documents which survive so we can compare for ourselves exactly how it happened.
"these documents" refers to the documents collected for the eventual purpose of the bible, a few of which were left out - that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about.
I've heard this pathetic argument before and people making it betray their utter ignorance of historical, literary and archaeological rigour needed when studying the ancient near east.
At this point I stopped reading, since anyone who uses this haughty tone isn't worth listening to.
Graphical prettiness is not the point. That's not why PC games are better. It's because the complexity is better. more choices - more flexibility, the ability to more easily press the "buttons" on the "controller" (by which I mean keyboard. The console controllers suffer from the fact that you need more fingers than a human being actually has in order to simultaneously use the buttons and also have a good grip on the controller itself. If the "controller" is a keyboard you lay down on the table in front of you, then that frees up all five fingers on each hand for button-mashing. It was typical in Deus Ex or Thief for me to be hitting shift/alt/some_other_key, while also moving the mouse to turn myself around. That kind of thing I can't do on a console controller.)
Also, a keyboard has a secondary function - you can use it to quickly enter letters, or so I've heard.
Another place where the PC games win is in strategy and tactics. Playing something like Civilization without a mouse would really be terrible.
This doesn't mean consoles *can't* do these things. Keyboards for consoles can be made, and are being made, actually. Newer consoles like the Xbox are actually PC's on the inside, with hard drives and everything, so you can save games in a sane way with lots of context, instead of on a tight memory card that can only store crude data, and therefore limits what you can affect in the game. (If the savegame can only hold a tiny number of variables, then that limited number of variables is essentially all you can change about the gameworld - which is why strategy games on consoles have traditionally sucked - there's too mnuch context to try to fit it on the memory card unless you dumb down the game.)
Anyway, consoles *could* fix these failings, but they don't seem to actually be doing it in practice. In practice, "this game was designed for consoles" ends up involving not only designing the game for the console's hardware, but also designing it for the console's target audience - which is people who prefer a style of play that I don't like as much. (But it's still fun in a different way - it's just not as MUCH fun. Splinter Cell was great, but it doesn't hold a candle to Deus Ex or Thief for what it was trying to do. The Dark Clouds and the Final Fantasies are great, but they don't come close to the richness of RPG's on computer (and no, I don't mean MMORPG - I mean things like Arcanum and Fallout.)
About the only style of game that is better on consoles is the "small groupd of friends play the same game in front of the same TV" kind of games, since you can plug in multiple controllers.
Things like platform jumpers are about a wash - Tomb Raider was about the same of PC as on consoles.
Another thing to remember is that consoles take Extreme advantage from the fact that they are going to be output to a TV screen, and TV screens are very low-res. They aren't actually any faster than PC's in their graphics. It's just that PC gamers don't typically try to play with a vertical resolution of only 400 lines.
Yawn. "Reveal himself" does not equate to "tell us what he wants every time a potential action is before us." That's what it would take for your "absolute" morality to actually be an absolute morality system when practiced by people.
I still say that your morality is no less relative than mine, because you have to use human faculties at some point in your decision making process. You don't get around this problem by claiming god has an absolute morality. The only way to get around it would be to say that not only does god have an absolute morality system, but that YOU are personally tapped into it such that you always know, at any given moment, exactly what god wants."
And even THEN you still don't get around the problem because you still have the one key, crucial decision that you still have to make before you can apply the absolute morality from god - you have to decide if following what god tells you to do is a good thing to do. THAT decision is still in your own hands, and it is the underpinning for everything else that is allegedly absolute about your morality.
In other words, whether you like it or not, all moral systems are relative ones, even the ones that consist of making ONE single relative decision to adopt such-and-such an absolute system. So long as one link in the chain is relative, the whole chain from there on down is also relative.
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You are right that making an arbitrary-length routine would not have been sloppy - but given the way the contest works, getting the solution done in the fastest possible time gets you a larger score, and there are more problems given than you can solve in the time allotted, so people wouldn't bother - espeically in a language like Pascal (not my choice, but the other chioce was C and one of the team memners didn't know C) where making dynamic-length arrays is against the religiuously typecast nature of the language.
So, the point is, that the ones who did it fast all did it the fixed-length way, and in THAT, it is sloppy to just make a gigantic array.
I would assume you bothered to check your program against the maximum input (to check for time factors).
Of course. And if you read my post, you'd know that the givens as to how large the "maximum input" was was precisely where the mistake in the givens was. I did test for the maximum case they claimed the test data would contiain. But that claim was false.
You also forgot to mention that the three or four team members get to SHARE one computer. So, it's not only important to be able to solve problems quickly, it's also about managing the limited resources at your disposal.
I didn't forget. It was just irrelevant to my point.
Some tasks are still slow no matter how fast a computer is. If I'm rendering a raytraced scene then it *always* takes longer than I'd like it to, even if on my newer computer it takes 2 minutes instead of the 10 minutes it used to take. IN that situation, I don't want wasted cycles.
Besides, there's also a visibility issue. I like to SEE what's behind the window I'm moving. It gives me a better idea where I want to drop it off. Now, transluscent windows might be worth the wasted clock cycles, but opaque ones are not because not only do they take more time, they are also less useful.
Whenever *I* see someone say wasted clock cycles are no big deal, *I* think, "there's someone who payed too much for his computer, because he's clearly got a more powerful computer than his usage calls for."
This approach works well when you know up front what is possible. It doesn't work as well when you are exploring new territory and making a program of a type nobody has made before - you are almost guaranteed to discover in the process of actually getting it to work that the way you originally envisioned it would behave is just not the right way to do it after all.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
Only when the mistake is made to make bells and whistles mandatory. Becuase of that decision, Gnome will never be used in something like a PDA.
I don't like wasting clock cycles on something pointless, like sending hundreds of redraw requests to a window that I'm resizing. Even on my 2.6 Ghz machine with a Radeon 9000 graphics card, I *still* use outline dragging becuase those 2.6 Ghz would be better spent on something else.
Good job to all who participated. This thing is *hard* because, while the problems are not insurmountable, you are only give 5 hours to do as many of them as you can. It's a contest in how good you are at predicting where the difficulty in the problem lays, and nailing that problem right away. Some of the problems look deceptively simple. It's the ones that immediately notice what it is about them that's not simple that do well.
Way back when, I got to participate in one of these as an undergrad (it was 1994, if my memory is right). I've still got a little bit of a bitter memory over that one because a mistake in the givens of a problem caused our team to lose one of the problems - one which we would have gotten a HUGE score on otherwise. (Because it was done 'right'* in just 30 minutes, and your score is based on how much clock time was left after your solution is accepted.) (And that year the problems were really hard such that the winning team only got 3 of 7 done - they had accidentally given the undergrads the contest that was supposed to be for the grads - so missing one problem is a huge difference.)
* - But what was wrong with it was based entirely on a misprint in the problems presented to us. The problem involved calculating big factorial numbers (among a few other things). The trick was to realize that no computer had a native number format that could store 300 factorial, and so you had to invent your own string-of-digits number primative that could handle N digits and multiply two numbers - given that N could be in the thousands - it's a simple problem, but the trick is to realize it is necessary to make up your own primitive. I realized it right away and wrote up the number primitive in a few minutes. But there was a problem - the givens in the problem description guaranteed that the test input will contain no factorials that result in more than FOO digits, where FOO was something in th 5,000's. This was the misprint - the biggest test they used actually contained something like FOO+200 digits, where FOO was in the 5,000's. There was no good way to check this given, since to do so required that we have a large-number multiplying routine - which is what this program was all about in the first place - which is why they gave it to you as a given.
So when I allocated an array of size FOO+1 (for some overhead), my program kept crashing. Those people who got sloppy and didn't try to be efficient and just made a huge array of size 10,000 had their programs work just fine on the first attempt. Those people that tried believing the given in the problem had programs crashing. And the nature of the test environment was that we couldn't see our programs' responses to the test data, and the test results weren't allowed to tell us what really happened when the program was run - just that "program terminated prematurely.", and that's it - no information about the data that caused this, and no indication of where the program died. In our own tests everything worked fine because we weren't trying numbers larger than the givens PROMISED us the test data needed, but when the solution was submitted, the test data tried larger numbers than the given promised would be used, and thus the program crashed.
I only know what happened because an announcement was made 4 hours and 30 minutes into the contest that there was a misprint and then the correction was given. Then I changed the size of the array, resubmitted, and it was right, after too many penalty points for failed submissions, and 4 hours of points wasted on THEIR mistake. Yeah, I'm still a bit bitter, because their attitude was that the contest was allegedly still "fair" because everyone had the same misprint on their handouts, and scores would not be adjusted for this mistake. I called "bullshit" because some people hadn't even tried that problem and therefore were unaffected by its misprint, and people who had been sloppy and picked a huge array were also unaffected by the misprint.
Our team had a chance of pl
I think that what interfaces truly need are simple rules that can be quickly learned, from which one can intuit the more complex details.
If that's what they wanted, they would't lambast the 'vi' interface as the worst text editor experience. Vi is very simple, and quickly learned, and the simple rules build to make more complex ones (for example, if 'foo' is the command to move the cursor to a spot, then 'd' followed by 'foo' is the command to delete that section and shove it in the default buffer.) But people don't want to be able to intuit complex tasks from how the simpler ones work - becuase basically they don't want the 'tree' of learning that that approach creates. They want *all* tasks to be simple in a flat model with no heirarchy. They really hate it when foo doesn't make sense until after you've already learned bar. This is why they hate tools like vi, while programmers love it.
If you know you're going to be using a program a LOT, then the best UI is one that favors long-term application of your learning more so than short-term. If you're only going to be using it occasionally, then the best UI is the one that favors short-term learning more so than long-term application of your learning.
The problem is that short-term and long-term learning of a tool are often in conflict and cannot both be optimized. Hence you end up
with the big fights over what counts as a "good" user interface - where the programmers and the end users can't agree because they don't have the same needs.
That's why the ideal situation is to have open standards for file formats - then the same file can be used by a simple end-user tool and by a complex tool, and each side can use what they want and be happy.
Too many cooks and ONLY ONE POT spoil the soup - but I'd rather have too many cooks each with their own pot than one cook and one pot.
Having a window system that can work quickly on low quality hardware is not just a 'pet quirk'. And gnome threw that away by making the one and only one choice be the choice that is more computationally expensive.
I understand the impetus behind restricting the choices. I don't understand why the lowest common denominator wasn't what was used.
Every braile pad I've seen on an ATM has been a plastic add-on sticker - a sheet that eventually ends up peeling off on the corners with wear. That doesn't sound like something that's manufactured into the machine. It's something slapped onto it afterward, and therefore NO it doesn't make it cheaper to make all machines with it.
Well, it's often very hard for people to remember what it was like to think before having all the knowlege they do now. I find it admirable that you recognise this problem and admit to it (I probably do it too, everyone does). It's one of the problems experts who teach often have - it's one thing to know a lot, but its really hard to try to pave a path that somoene else can follow that leads them to the same knowlege. One big problem is that teachers have a hard time remembering how things looked to themselves back when they didn't already have all the same information.
As far as word-of-mouth evidence, there's a real problem when it's written down by someone other than the person speaking. (Even if you accept that Jesus existed as described in the bible, that would mean that Jesus never wrote anything down, as the bible accounts all come from other people. It would have been easier if there was a book that said, "Hi, my name is Jesus, let me tell you what I did today...".) So that immediately makes me suspicious as to the veracity of the words being put in his mouth. (Why wasn't the alleged Son Of God even literate - seems like an oversight.)
A lot of people trying to support the veracity of the New Testament bring up how court trials accept eyewitness testimony, so why can't we? Well, this view ignores the fact taht courts DON'T accept secondhand hearsay testimony, and that's what the bible is, even if its an accurate writing down of what the disciples said - becuase THEY were reporting what Jesus allegedly said. When person X gets on the stand and says that person Y said such-and-such happened, that's not acceptable evidence. Courts only accept one level of indirection in the witness testimony.
The funny thing is that you apparently think there's something wrong with that mentality. If two systems have equal quality, and one is an expensive product and the other is being made in people's spare time for no charge, that says something pretty bad about the expensive product.
I worked for them for a grand total of 3 months. I only took up the job because there was another local company I wanted to work for, which only hired contractors, and Keane was one of the main ones they used, and my skillset matched up so exactly to that other company that I figured I'd have a good chance to get into it after a little time 'in the trenches' .
...shudder...
I found out after hiring on that Keane had actually just lost that contract with the company I wanted to work for, and the few people they still had there were being extricated one by one as their projects finished.
So I got shoved off into a corner writing unix C/SQL query library routines of the form "do this exact query, just like it's described here, and stick the results in these variables, and then return them - no, don't ask what these queries do." It was for a local Telco. The work was dull, but the pay was good. But it only lasted about 2 months. I was a bit worried that despite being the new guy on the project (of three people) that I knew more about the technical aspects of the programming environment than the people who were already on the project. I knew how to run the dbx debugger, for example. No, seriously - nobody else knew how to do that - they were saying "I thought unix doesn't have debuggers.." Understandable for an end-user, but these guys were writing code...
I sat "on the bench" after that because I didn't have the skillset that matched their contracts. Their contracts were all visual basic and some old mainfraime MVS stuff. They claimed there was no demand anymore for someone who knew unix/c/c++/perl/ and so on. (I suspect they just didn't have the ability to convince companies in that line of work to use their consultants.) They said I should learn VB while waiting. I offerred to learn Java instead, which they accepted because it was a new buzzword at the time.
Then they gave me some kind of nationalized standard skills test they have in C. They figured they could check if maybe some other city had good work that would match.
They said I scored higher than anyone in their branch ever had before.
I got scared. I know I flubbed up a few things on that test. I know I only did "okay" on it - probably somewhere around 85% correct. But if that's the best they had, then that means their reputation among places trying to hire C programmers would be awful and I'd never get good contracts with them.
As I was contemplating quitting, they said they had an opening in Mineappolis (about a 6 hour drive away), and that it needed someone with C and unix experience. While it was a matter of maintenence rather than development, they were trying to migrate from an old system to a new one and needed someone who could understand the old one to help. While not the greatest job, it still sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try.
So, a week later, living out of suitcases in Keane's furnished apartment in Minneapolis, I started my first day on the job....which turned out to have nothing to do with my skills at all. there was no C. There was no Unix. There was no SQL. The old system they were migrating from was OS/2. The program was rexx scripts. The job was not to migrate the program at all, but to just babysit it and watch the output logs for errors until the new system came online. They lied to me. Plain and simple. They lied about what the job entailed when they said it needed a person with C/unix skills. I asked the local guy what else will the assignment entail after this portion is over - of watching the program and reporting errors - he said, that's it. That *is* the assignment. I was not involved in the migration. I was not involved in programming anything at all.
Two days later I'd found another job over the internet (a job I still am happily staying with 6 years later) and had quit Keane.
There was no excuse for their practice of
(1) lying to me about what the job entailed.
(2) sending me off far away when they do it,
probably under the hope that I'd roll over and
take it since I'd be so far removed from my
support network for job hunting.
The problem is that the U.S. doesn't have it's own top level domain that gets used much. You see lots of sites ending in .uk, or .fr, or .au, and so on, but not a whole lot ending in .us - instead the US sites just use the main original heirarchy of .com, .org, .net, .edu, and so on - which unfortunately a lot of other countries also use. There is no guarantee that a non-usa site will end in a country TLD, and so no guarantee that a .com or .org address is or is not in the US.
In this case, it's being used in the same sense as it's literal technical definition. It's not being used in a buzzwordy way. I use the word "disambiguate" all the time. I write parsers.
Those who really do watch all 395 channels will pay more.
Those who really do watch all 395 channels must be living in an alternate universe where there's more time per week. Even if a viewer is awake 24 hours a day, for 7 days a week, and does nothing but watch TV, and needs to watch all 395 channels in a week, then he's watching each channel for only about 25 minutes.
When studying any sort of controversial claim about an event that allegedly happened, only the ones that believe it to be true bother looking at the evidece for a long length of time. The skeptics stop bothering once they see enough problems to repudate their skepticism. Therefore your point about how those that are skeptical haven't spent as long on it as you have is technically true, but doesn't lead to the conclusion you are trying to make it lead to. It doesn't mean their claims are less informed. It means their claims don't require nearly as much evidence - once they had what they needed, they stopped. The believer, on the other hand, doesn't stop at just looking at it enough to make him think it's true. Once he's done that, he's got a lot more to study about all the details of the event.
In other words, I doubt that out of those years you spent studying the event, that they were all spent on the issue of whether or not it happened. I'd guess that most of that time was spent on what the consequences of that event happeneing would be, after you believed it happened.
The resserection has no evidence that is not word-of-mouth. If you believe word of mouth to be acceptable evidence, then you can study further into the issue. If you don't then you're done, and you don't spend years on it.
Sorry. I sit corrected.
(I was used to hearing of a system consisting of throttle and cyclic, not a system with fixed-speed blades using a collective and cylcic, and therefore thought of "throttle" as the lifting controller and "that c-word I can't remember" as the tilt control. I didn't realize that new systems use TWO "c-words I can't remember".)
I installed OO on one place at work. Multiple people are using it from different workstations, no problem. But that's because I'm using an OS that was designed with that kind of usage pattern in mind from the beginning, not one for which it was an afterthought. Someone who wants to run OO on their workstation either runs it off of the shared NFS drive, or runs it through remote X-windows. This took no effort at all to set up. It just works by default.
There was a problem with the install, though, that has nothing to do with network versus personal use - if you have a bad font file installed somewhere in your system, Open office's installer crashes becasue it tries to read all the fonts in the system with it's own font rendering library (instead of using the one in the windows server) before it gets to the last one in the path, which is the one it actually uses in the installer. If any of the truetype fonts are corrupt (which can happen if you got them from a download), it never gets far enough along to read the font it wants to use for installing.
That's a huge problem, but it's been fixed in the open beta version, by giving the installer a fallback font to use that's ugly but guaranteed to work, when the font it wants to use is not working. (I would prefer a fix that just stops trying to use it's own font engine altogether and just uses the one that is in the x server, since they can all handle truetype fonts well now - and the only reason for OO having its own font renderer is now moot.)
By default, Outlook blocks users from opening any attachments whereas Mozilla doesn't - which e-mail client is most at risk from an e-mail borne virus?
The one designed to run on Windows, with maybe Mac thrown in as an afterthought. The one designed to run cross-platform doesn't have as many hooks that are used to mess up your system.
Uhm - not directly. The collective is the 'stick' that controls the tilt of the helicopter.
Larry says this a lot better than I ever could.
Since it wasn't more than a bunch of assertions, that's kind of sad that you don't think you can do it better. Larry's comments that you pasted would only serve to convince those who are already convinced to begin with. Oh well.
I believe through faith, but I don't see how the absence of God changes this in the slightest.
If there's no discernable difference between a hypothetical universe in which your god does exist from a hypothetical one in which your god doesn't, then your god's existance is irrelevant.
[Followed by some claims that don't contradict what I said.]
Nope - there is a large collection of these documents which survive so we can compare for ourselves exactly how it happened.
"these documents" refers to the documents collected for the eventual purpose of the bible, a few of which were left out - that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about.
I've heard this pathetic argument before and people making it betray their utter ignorance of historical, literary and archaeological rigour needed when studying the ancient near east.
At this point I stopped reading, since anyone who uses this haughty tone isn't worth listening to.
Graphical prettiness is not the point. That's not why PC games are better. It's because the complexity is better. more choices - more flexibility, the ability to more easily press the "buttons" on the "controller" (by which I mean keyboard. The console controllers suffer from the fact that you need more fingers than a human being actually has in order to simultaneously use the buttons and also have a good grip on the controller itself. If the "controller" is a keyboard you lay down on the table in front of you, then that frees up all five fingers on each hand for button-mashing. It was typical in Deus Ex or Thief for me to be hitting shift/alt/some_other_key, while also moving the mouse to turn myself around. That kind of thing I can't do on a console controller.)
Also, a keyboard has a secondary function - you can use it to quickly enter letters, or so I've heard.
Another place where the PC games win is in strategy and tactics. Playing something like Civilization without a mouse would really be terrible.
This doesn't mean consoles *can't* do these things. Keyboards for consoles can be made, and are being made, actually. Newer consoles like the Xbox are actually PC's on the inside, with hard drives and everything, so you can save games in a sane way with lots of context, instead of on a tight memory card that can only store crude data, and therefore limits what you can affect in the game. (If the savegame can only hold a tiny number of variables, then that limited number of variables is essentially all you can change about the gameworld - which is why strategy games on consoles have traditionally sucked - there's too mnuch context to try to fit it on the memory card unless you dumb down the game.)
Anyway, consoles *could* fix these failings, but they don't seem to actually be doing it in practice. In practice, "this game was designed for consoles" ends up involving not only designing the game for the console's hardware, but also designing it for the console's target audience - which is people who prefer a style of play that I don't like as much. (But it's still fun in a different way - it's just not as MUCH fun. Splinter Cell was great, but it doesn't hold a candle to Deus Ex or Thief for what it was trying to do. The Dark Clouds and the Final Fantasies are great, but they don't come close to the richness of RPG's on computer (and no, I don't mean MMORPG - I mean things like Arcanum and Fallout.)
About the only style of game that is better on consoles is the "small groupd of friends play the same game in front of the same TV" kind of games, since you can plug in multiple controllers.
Things like platform jumpers are about a wash - Tomb Raider was about the same of PC as on consoles.
Another thing to remember is that consoles take Extreme advantage from the fact that they are going to be output to a TV screen, and TV screens are very low-res. They aren't actually any faster than PC's in their graphics. It's just that PC gamers don't typically try to play with a vertical resolution of only 400 lines.
Yawn.
"Reveal himself" does not equate to "tell us what he wants every time a potential action is before us." That's what it would take for your "absolute" morality to actually be an absolute morality system when practiced by people.
I still say that your morality is no less relative than mine, because you have to use human faculties at some point in your decision making process. You don't get around this problem by claiming god has an absolute morality. The only way to get around it would be to say that not only does god have an absolute morality system, but that YOU are personally tapped into it such that you always know, at any given moment, exactly what god wants."
And even THEN you still don't get around the problem because you still have the one key, crucial decision that you still have to make before you can apply the absolute morality from god - you have to decide if following what god tells you to do is a good thing to do. THAT decision is still in your own hands, and it is the underpinning for everything else that is allegedly absolute about your morality.
In other words, whether you like it or not, all moral systems are relative ones, even the ones that consist of making ONE single relative decision to adopt such-and-such an absolute system. So long as one link in the chain is relative, the whole chain from there on down is also relative.