You don't understand. You can't drive a Porsche and a Hyundai each at 100km/h, and then conclude that they have equal top speeds.
THAT is ALSO a "real world test", but equally meaningless!
The test referred to in the article boils down to "is the consumer satisfied with this use case?" That's as far as you can take it, and you can do that type of evaluation on your own.
>Isn't the point of 96kHz sampling that you end up being pretty sure that you are exceeding the signal response of your microphone?
Well, if by microphone, you mean the whole signal path, then yes, sort of. In the digital domain, the highest frequency that can be reliably reproduced is the Nyquist value, which is essentially a frequency band in the area around half the sample rate (so.5 the rate is called the "Nyquist Frequency", but it's not quite as simple as people make it out to be.)
Anyway, 22050Hz is actually at or above the limits of human perception. From a consumer entertainment perspective, the 44.1kHz standard for sample rate is a perfectly reasonable compromise. Likewise, the 16 bits of dynamic range is, arguably, a perfectly fine amount of headroom.
The problems come into play on the *production* side. There are many, many cases with benefits for having wider latitude in dynamic range, so setting frequency response aside, the case for 24-bit audio (the dynamic domain) is easily made.
Frequency response headroom problems are a bit harder to understand. In music synthesis and many kinds of effects processing, it is quite common to experience aliasing, artifacts that result from the "low" sample rates of 44.1kHz or 48kHz that have quite audible and detrimental consequences. Because of this class of problems, 96kHz processing makes sense.
Back to dynamic range. Dynamic range problems are much more easily explained with the analogous problems in video and images -- the problem is immediately recognized. It's the same with audio, just not as obvious to a casual listener, and perhaps even irrelevant to some genres of music.
Another issue is the use of 24 bit values -- it turns out that many machine architectures can process 24-bit values much more efficiently in 32-bit words, so we generally do 32-bit processing. It goes further. We don't want to use 32-bit ints if you can use floats, because we are able to exploit the fact that, when dealing with numbers between -1.0 and 1.0, we can do gain adjustments and other processing by affecting the exponent, and never losing precision in the mantissa. This is why most audio processing software works in 32-bit float internally, because working in int actually leads to loss of precision, and can be significant loss in certain common kinds of operation.
Haven't even touched on the compression angle, which puts me off topic, sorry.
I use 24-bit, 48kHz audio for two reasons. 1. My material tends to be quite dynamic, but also tends to be relatively quiet. I don't need the extrema, it's the resolution I'm after. 2. It happens that certain equipment clocks at 48kHz and so I tend to use that.
I personally don't care about higher sample rates except when doing synthesis in software, where aliasing is a problem.
>You must be increadibly naive if you think that stuido monitors are the end-all as far as speakers are concerned.
I'm not, and I don't. I think the room is much more important than the monitors, for instance, and said so. In any case, I'm suggesting a better platform for an empirical test than earbuds makes possible, and reminding everyone that it hasn't been studied as well as some people assume.
I'm not just saying use just anybody's studio monitors in just any room. I'm saying, do it at Lucas' mastering place or whatever....
>There are 100 US Senators and 435 (voting) US Congressmen. All of them vote on US legislation which has a direct and immediate impact on > my life:
I'll bet your state legislature and your town council vote on far more legislation which has a significantly more direct and immediate impact on your life. And it's likely your local politicians answer their own phone and reply to their own mail, and will develop personal relationships with their constituents. One of the reps from my district in the State House is a friend and neighbor of mine, and does lots of little things like writing thank you notes by hand, and personal responses to emails.
Whenever I see things like this article, it bugs me, because I have personally made larger contributions to political campaigns than these people who are supposedly heavy players.
>My brother says that he tried "What are you wearing?" once and the clueless caller said, "Jeans and a T-shirt. Why?" >I guess he wasn't ready for that. The next question should have been, "Are you wearing any underwear?"
It's both amusing and sad when people think they are somehow the first person to abuse that telemarketer today, or that they are somehow the funniest or most offensive or whatever that day.
All you ever need to say is "please take us off your list, thank you."
The person at the other end of the line is doing one of the few shiddy jobs in his nowhere town. The other one is something like cutting up chickens 14 hours a day. The ones with a brain and a sense of humor have heard *everything* and they just want their day to end. The ones without, don't get it anyway.
I know the original topic is about recruiters, and not telemarketers in general. I tell the recruiters point blanc what I want. Sometimes they think I'm kidding, sometimes a big dollar sign lights up over their heads as they consider how lucrative it would be if they could actually find that gig for me, and then it fades as they realize, say, nobody is actually looking for me to take a C-level or EVP or director position for $1.5 mil plus preferred stock located in Maui or Gstaad. I can find regular jobs on my own, thank you. It bothers me a lot when people think I'm kidding when I name my price:-)
>After that, for each call, invoice them at contractor rates for half an hour.
>Send the invoice at the end of each month with a full itinery of phone calls received.
I've heard this idea, and variations of it, but do you have an example of a case where it has worked? It sounds like a fun-ish prank, but is it workable? The notion of what you claim to be a "contract" (receipt of a registered letter) won't stand on its own. The contents of the letter won't even be admitted as evidence, so unless you can get them to *actually sign* (and probably notarize) a legitimate contract, you'd just be out your time and money for the letter, and accomplish nothing.
I have worked in many situations where telephone time was billable, but there was always a specific agreement with the client who clearly understood this. If an attorney's office starts billing people for time when there is not a working attorney-client relationship in effect, the office could find itself in quite a pickle. Judges tend to frown on attorney billing fraud...
IANALBIHSLAWFMLF (I am not a l*y* but I have studied l* and worked for many l* firms)
>just calling up key people to see if anyone is disloyal?
Disloyal? WTF? My employer knows damned well I work for him for two reasons:
1. The compensation is acceptable. 2. I enjoy the environment enough that I choose to remain, since reason #1 can be met elsewhere.
I am *loyal* to my *dog.* If an employer got on some kind of trip where *loyalty* is asked, I am quite certain reason #2 flies straight down the crapper at that instant, and certain people who can accommodate reason #1 get contacted, which would make a few of them *very* happy.
What's this about phones anyway? People still use those things? How quaint!
If you want to work for somebody who expects *loyalty* join the army or something. Sheesh. I would not last a day with that crap.
"The result isn't as useful without knowing how those that didn't pick the high bit rate were split up. Out of the 4 that didn't pick high bit rate with Shure headphones, how many picked low bit rate, and how many couldn't tell the difference?"
Why didn't they test in a mastering studio? Earbuds? Sheesh, seriously. Not only are they testing for something that is at or beyond the limits of human perception, but they are also degrading the signal confounding the test.
Here's a test I'd like to see done.
Have an orchestra in a studio, great room treatment and miking, etc. Have the listener in the control room doing blind A/B/X testing between the live orchestra through the monitoring system, and recordings of that same orchestra at various bitrates, dynamic thresholds, compression formats, etc.
It may be surprising that nothing like this has ever been done, and so in audio production discussions, the subject invariably comes up (whether 24 bits in the dynamic domain is overkill, whether 96kHz sampling is useful, etc.) but the arguments always go into emacs vs vi territory because there's no empirical study that anyone can point to where it's been shown whether and to what extent high headroom digital domains affect the listener.
It makes me sick that someone would do such a test with headphones. Just use the average mastering studio's monitors and room treatment, and take the listening environment out of the equation as much as possible.
*Anybody* can do the anecdotal thing with an iPod and "expensive" earbuds; sheesh.
Seeing that I'm doing *science*, no. You raise some interesting points. I have no idea if machine vision is going to find a place in this research any time soon, but I'd certainly enjoy exploring it. All I need now is an NSF grant:-)
One of the academic research areas I've been involved in, is study of the so-called "Other Race Effect". There is some evidence that people have quantifiable error when asked to identify faces of people of other races than their own.
>For the average working person with a life, where you have to miss work to show up in court, it's easier to just pay the stupid little >fee and go on with your functional life
It tends to be, and we tend to hear horror stories about being sued or facing charges. The thing is, those horror stories very rarely involve a situation where the individual is actually completely innocent, not at all responsible for the damages being claimed, etc. Those kinds of cases are usually very quickly settled with nothing more than an absentee motion for summary judgment, etc.
The problem arises when a party is actually guilty (or responsible, etc.) and seeks to mitigate the damage by persuading a court, using the legal system as a tool, etc.
If a case actually gets to the court-date point, let alone, goes for more than a single day, it is rarely if ever a simple matter of one party being completely innocent of what's being claimed against them by the other.
I have used such common misconceptions to my advantage from time to time, and prevailed.
>Yeah except I was watching the race when the accident happened and not once did they say "linux" and none of the camera shots showed a readable view >of the sponsor logo (one side of the car being completely smashed).
Richard Petty tells a story about his last big crash where the only thing his sponsor (STP) had to say was how upset they were that their logo wasn't visible in any of the crash footage...
Something tells me the bonfire didn't include anything current from O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, or Prentice-Hall PTR.
Also unlikely to have included any popular (or vintage) RPG material, any collectible graphic novels, anything that has ever been on any high school required reading list, or anything that anyone acutually buys. I'd be willing to bet the contents of the bonfire are limited to overstocked books that were published as the extension of the writer's ego (e.g., I see large stacks of books by current politicians that nobody is expected to buy -- the value is in the perception that a stack of hardcover books generates), or various kinds of craft, collection, or coffee table books that tend to sit in the bargain aisle for years, that even the used bookstores won't take.
Now, if you told me the guy was burning a specific list of books that indicated a certain political statement, I would take a little interest. If you told me that the local government sanctioned this burning -but stipulated what books may and may not be burned- I'd pick up the torch and lead the protest. If you told me that the bookstore owner was burning somebody *else's* books without that person's consent, I'd expect civil and criminal action to follow.
As it happens, I'm merely amused that the bookstore owner got a ticket for having an unpermitted fire in a place where open fires of that type are illegal. It would have been ironic (but very unfunny) if the fire had gotten out of control and burned anything the owner considered "inventory."
I would support a law that required recycling in a situation like this. But all the comments that charity and libraries "should" take these books, don't come from a point of view that seems to understand just how useless a waste of space the sort of books that even a bookstore owner would destroy, really are.
>That said, there's a big difference between driving drunk from a club downtown where you have to drive through city traffic and driving >drunk from a bar in the middle of nowhere; neither is good, but one clearly has less favorable odds than the other.
Right. Driving drunk through midtown traffic keeps you on your toes: You have to constantly make decisions, you have to negotiate the trip in spite of many police whose sole task is DUI response, and you have to deal with other drivers, many of whom are *also* driving across town after the standard (state-mandated) bar closing time. On the other hand, a drunk driving trip on a rural road allows the driver to become complacent, to neglect the fact that he is drunk, offers fewer, infrequent distractions and decisions that have to be made, and once he passes the DUI checkpoint at the city limits, if he can maintain a lane and keep a constant speed, he probably will make it without incident. I'm not sure which of these scenarios was supposed to have the more favorable odds...
Don't you remember when they were having people arrested for comparison shopping? Wasn't this the store that tried to forbid *writing down prices?*
The ONLY reason to shop at Best Buy is to buy their loss-leader music CDs and DVDs, but I'm not sure they still do that, and I don't buy cartel-produced entertainment anymore.
>[F]ederal laws regarding abortion are unconstitutional: It must be left up to the states.
In a recent ruling that most commentators regard as a victory for the anti-abortion movement, Justice Kennedy's comments actually assert that a woman has a Constitutional Right to an abortion (thereby justifying the ruling as a reasonable and proper restriction on this right.)
The pro-lifers celebrated, probably never reading more than headlines and hearing no more than the sound bites on this decision. They do not seem to have recognized this as a Pyrrhic victory, drawing a line that pretty much ends any hope for the pro-life movement to ever prevail at a state or federal level, and preserving the argument for the status quo that actually supports the pro-choice movement (the assertion that such a Constitutional Right exists, given by a Supreme Court Justice, is the strongest argument to date in support of abortion rights!) I thought this was absolutely ingenious. End the debate quietly, while appearing to settle it in favor of one side.
You're preaching to the choir, Lizard. I know there are good resources available. My point was, that there are people who also realize this, still using FORTRAN in scientific computing, and they think they have good reasons. I tend to think the whole field should be torn down and rebuilt from first principles, but I don't carry that kind of weight:-)
>as requested a comp sci program without most of the theory you mentioned.
That's not missing much for a BA; the only things I see missing are courses in formal grammars, automata, and algorithm analysis. This school looks like it's training practitioners as opposed to scientists; and that's perfectly reasonable. A BS program would and should be heavy on the theory and should include a supporting science. At my current shop that science pretty much needs to be physics and it's really helpful if you studied chemistry. But then, what we do is actually science. I've been in the business world too, and I realize that in most IT jobs, 99.44% of everything learned in school either needs to be unlearned or else atrophies. Different worlds, of course.
>Not all developers have a background in Computer Science.
Here's yet another phenomenon. I don't expect someone who majors in English to go into Medicine. I respect the Engineering curriculum, but it bothers me that engineers often don't recognize that they are crossing fields when they become software developers. I wouldn't expect a computer scientist to be competent at material science, any more than I expect things to work the other way around.
>Why do I need to know about OS and compiler design to develop high level software for solving real problems?
> I find the opposite to be true. A C++ programmer is able to move to C without much problems, but the oppose it just not true.
There are some very idiomatic elements to C++ that are not of obvious utility from a C programmer's point of view. This can even escape people who *Teach* C++. Some differences between C and C++ look tiny, but have enormous implications.
Consider a couple; const correctness, and the function-style casts.
There is a short list of specific things where C++ differs from C. So a programmer can basically write C in a C++ environment and get away with it. He can even make use of the type/class/object system, heap based memory allocation, etc. But these are really still superficial differences. The real differences don't present themselves so much as syntactic distinctions, and it is quite obvious when a C programmer writes "C in C++".
Likewise there are some big hurdles that a Java programmer has to get over before being a really effective C++ programmer, although in these cases, the whole OO-design idea has usually taken root; sometimes even more than is typically idiomatic for C++ -- you can tell when someone is thinking Java and writing C++ too.
Like I said, the differences can be subtle, but fundamental, and it really jumps off the screen when an experienced C++ programmer sees the work of another experienced C++ programmer, as opposed to the C++ of a java or C programmer. Hard to explain, but I suspect you know what I'm saying if you are one.
"Exactly... There are critical Cobol applications that run in a virtual machine in another virtual machine on big IBM iron that keep making money for big banks."
And this is an area where Linux, very quietly, penetrated. We're a lot closer to world domination than people seem to think:-)
>I just started working in the actuarial department of an insurance company. Almost all of our code is in Fortran.
Ah, you work in the OTHER place where people routinely do calculus on the whiteboard and people who have a choice and know lots of languages, program in FORTRAN.
Surprised the hell out of me too.
For number-theoretic approaches to certain classes of problems, FORTRAN gives some guarantees, offers optimizations, has the widest range of libraries available, and scales in ways that aren't even a consideration in other idioms.
I hate FORTRAN as a grammar, but I certainly now have an appreciation of why it's used by the people who use it. Know what it took to make me realize this? I needed to be told by someone whose skills in other languages meets or exceeds my own. Then I understood; it's not that you have a golden hammer, know only one thing, and stick to it (that's what I thought FORTRAN was!). It's something else, and it has to do with the fact that we are easily deluded into thinking that a modern grammar equals an object better suited to task. It turns out to be true in some cases, but life-and-death-NOT-TRUE in others.
It would be scary to have someone naively think he could duplicate a math-intensive FORTRAN module with C or Java. How certain are you of the behavior of your language's exponentiation operator between quadruple precision floating point and an integer? Willing to bet your life on it? What does your language have built in for arbitrary precision? Willing to bet your life on that too?
How do you get out of university without taking an architecture course that gives some assembly language, at least for a hypothetical machine?
If you claim to have a BS in CS at the interview table, but didn't suffer through, e.g., a computer organization course (like Hennessy and Patterson style, which is common these days), didn't have a course where you developed an operating system, didn't design a language starting from BNF and build a compiler for it, didn't take 2 years of a lab science, didn't at least come close to a math minor, didn't have at least 4 courses at various levels of discrete math, automata, algorithm analyis, and didn't have a course that, as a final project, you deliver a significant user app in a high level language (on the order of an original multiplayer game, let's say)... I'd say your school has some explaining to do.
Seriously, what school can you go to and somehow avoid having a significant background in several languages and paradigms, including but certainly not limited to asm, C, and either C++ or Java, if not both? I don't expect everyone to take an elective where they compare Lisp, Scheme, Ruby, Haskell, and Icon. And I realize that there's often a variety of senior-year choices, and some people don't take Databases choosing HighPerf/Parallel/Distributed computing, say, or 3D Graphics. But there are some basic things that you'd better have done, or else, despite having the piece of paper hanging on your office wall, you're not done with school!
>Sure its a lot easier to program the same thing in a more modern language
Your other comments don't bear that out:-)
I worked in a cobol shop (oil exploration corp, where I programmed in C on HP unix, and never actually touched cobol).
I don't mean to essentially repeat what you said, but it was obvious that business processes had been developed along with software, forms, management structure, controls, and so forth. The problem of replacing software systems wouldn't have been a simple matter of gathering requirements and developing modules to fit those requirements. That's the assumption that leads to the "WTF" factor when you tell the young'ns people still use COBOL. (And read my earlier rant on FORTRAN, which is today in active use, by people who choose it even though they are proficient in modern programming languages!)
On the other hand, there *were* instances where some mainframe COBOL apps were replaced with small desktop apps written in VB2.0 (showing my age, but I was mid-career when VB came out:-)
I think some people think a "big project" is on the order of an OS or a GUI framework, and don't appreciate the scale of what's going on in the big business mainframe world, etc. I worked in that world for a good while, and I'm not even sure I fully comprehend the scale:-)
Slashdot Mirror
>Gosh that's a hard question!
You don't understand. You can't drive a Porsche and a Hyundai each at 100km/h, and then conclude that they have equal top speeds.
THAT is ALSO a "real world test", but equally meaningless!
The test referred to in the article boils down to "is the consumer satisfied with this use case?" That's as far as you can take it, and you can do that type of evaluation on your own.
>Isn't the point of 96kHz sampling that you end up being pretty sure that you are exceeding the signal response of your microphone?
Well, if by microphone, you mean the whole signal path, then yes, sort of. In the digital domain, the highest frequency that can be reliably reproduced is the Nyquist value, which is essentially a frequency band in the area around half the sample rate (so
Anyway, 22050Hz is actually at or above the limits of human perception. From a consumer entertainment perspective, the 44.1kHz standard for sample rate is a perfectly reasonable compromise. Likewise, the 16 bits of dynamic range is, arguably, a perfectly fine amount of headroom.
The problems come into play on the *production* side. There are many, many cases with benefits for having wider latitude in dynamic range, so setting frequency response aside, the case for 24-bit audio (the dynamic domain) is easily made.
Frequency response headroom problems are a bit harder to understand. In music synthesis and many kinds of effects processing, it is quite common to experience aliasing, artifacts that result from the "low" sample rates of 44.1kHz or 48kHz that have quite audible and detrimental consequences. Because of this class of problems, 96kHz processing makes sense.
Back to dynamic range. Dynamic range problems are much more easily explained with the analogous problems in video and images -- the problem is immediately recognized. It's the same with audio, just not as obvious to a casual listener, and perhaps even irrelevant to some genres of music.
Another issue is the use of 24 bit values -- it turns out that many machine architectures can process 24-bit values much more efficiently in 32-bit words, so we generally do 32-bit processing. It goes further. We don't want to use 32-bit ints if you can use floats, because we are able to exploit the fact that, when dealing with numbers between -1.0 and 1.0, we can do gain adjustments and other processing by affecting the exponent, and never losing precision in the mantissa. This is why most audio processing software works in 32-bit float internally, because working in int actually leads to loss of precision, and can be significant loss in certain common kinds of operation.
Haven't even touched on the compression angle, which puts me off topic, sorry.
I use 24-bit, 48kHz audio for two reasons. 1. My material tends to be quite dynamic, but also tends to be relatively quiet. I don't need the extrema, it's the resolution I'm after. 2. It happens that certain equipment clocks at 48kHz and so I tend to use that.
I personally don't care about higher sample rates except when doing synthesis in software, where aliasing is a problem.
>You must be increadibly naive if you think that stuido monitors are the end-all as far as speakers are concerned.
I'm not, and I don't. I think the room is much more important than the monitors, for instance, and said so. In any case, I'm suggesting a better platform for an empirical test than earbuds makes possible, and reminding everyone that it hasn't been studied as well as some people assume.
I'm not just saying use just anybody's studio monitors in just any room. I'm saying, do it at Lucas' mastering place or whatever....
>There are 100 US Senators and 435 (voting) US Congressmen. All of them vote on US legislation which has a direct and immediate impact on
> my life:
I'll bet your state legislature and your town council vote on far more legislation which has a significantly more direct and immediate impact on your life. And it's likely your local politicians answer their own phone and reply to their own mail, and will develop personal relationships with their constituents. One of the reps from my district in the State House is a friend and neighbor of mine, and does lots of little things like writing thank you notes by hand, and personal responses to emails.
Whenever I see things like this article, it bugs me, because I have personally made larger contributions to political campaigns than these people who are supposedly heavy players.
>My brother says that he tried "What are you wearing?" once and the clueless caller said, "Jeans and a T-shirt. Why?"
:-)
>I guess he wasn't ready for that. The next question should have been, "Are you wearing any underwear?"
It's both amusing and sad when people think they are somehow the first person to abuse that telemarketer today, or that they are somehow the funniest or most offensive or whatever that day.
All you ever need to say is "please take us off your list, thank you."
The person at the other end of the line is doing one of the few shiddy jobs in his nowhere town. The other one is something like cutting up chickens 14 hours a day. The ones with a brain and a sense of humor have heard *everything* and they just want their day to end. The ones without, don't get it anyway.
I know the original topic is about recruiters, and not telemarketers in general. I tell the recruiters point blanc what I want. Sometimes they think I'm kidding, sometimes a big dollar sign lights up over their heads as they consider how lucrative it would be if they could actually find that gig for me, and then it fades as they realize, say, nobody is actually looking for me to take a C-level or EVP or director position for $1.5 mil plus preferred stock located in Maui or Gstaad. I can find regular jobs on my own, thank you. It bothers me a lot when people think I'm kidding when I name my price
>After that, for each call, invoice them at contractor rates for half an hour.
>Send the invoice at the end of each month with a full itinery of phone calls received.
I've heard this idea, and variations of it, but do you have an example of a case where it has worked?
It sounds like a fun-ish prank, but is it workable? The notion of what you claim to be a "contract" (receipt of a registered letter) won't stand on its own. The contents of the letter won't even be admitted as evidence, so unless you can get them to *actually sign* (and probably notarize) a legitimate contract, you'd just be out your time and money for the letter, and accomplish nothing.
I have worked in many situations where telephone time was billable, but there was always a specific agreement with the client who clearly understood this. If an attorney's office starts billing people for time when there is not a working attorney-client relationship in effect, the office could find itself in quite a pickle. Judges tend to frown on attorney billing fraud...
IANALBIHSLAWFMLF (I am not a l*y* but I have studied l* and worked for many l* firms)
>just calling up key people to see if anyone is disloyal?
Disloyal? WTF? My employer knows damned well I work for him for two reasons:
1. The compensation is acceptable.
2. I enjoy the environment enough that I choose to remain, since reason #1 can be met elsewhere.
I am *loyal* to my *dog.* If an employer got on some kind of trip where *loyalty* is asked, I am quite certain reason #2 flies straight down the crapper at that instant, and certain people who can accommodate reason #1 get contacted, which would make a few of them *very* happy.
What's this about phones anyway? People still use those things? How quaint!
If you want to work for somebody who expects *loyalty* join the army or something. Sheesh. I would not last a day with that crap.
"The result isn't as useful without knowing how those that didn't pick the high bit rate were split up. Out of the 4 that didn't pick high bit rate with Shure headphones, how many picked low bit rate, and how many couldn't tell the difference?"
Why didn't they test in a mastering studio? Earbuds? Sheesh, seriously. Not only are they testing for something that is at or beyond the limits of human perception, but they are also degrading the signal confounding the test.
Here's a test I'd like to see done.
Have an orchestra in a studio, great room treatment and miking, etc. Have the listener in the control room doing blind A/B/X testing between the live orchestra through the monitoring system, and recordings of that same orchestra at various bitrates, dynamic thresholds, compression formats, etc.
It may be surprising that nothing like this has ever been done, and so in audio production discussions, the subject invariably comes up (whether 24 bits in the dynamic domain is overkill, whether 96kHz sampling is useful, etc.) but the arguments always go into emacs vs vi territory because there's no empirical study that anyone can point to where it's been shown whether and to what extent high headroom digital domains affect the listener.
It makes me sick that someone would do such a test with headphones. Just use the average mastering studio's monitors and room treatment, and take the listening environment out of the equation as much as possible.
*Anybody* can do the anecdotal thing with an iPod and "expensive" earbuds; sheesh.
>Are you sure?
:-)
Seeing that I'm doing *science*, no. You raise some interesting points. I have no idea if machine vision is going to find a place in this research any time soon, but I'd certainly enjoy exploring it. All I need now is an NSF grant
One of the academic research areas I've been involved in, is study of the so-called "Other Race Effect". There is some evidence that people have quantifiable error when asked to identify faces of people of other races than their own.
Computers won't be subject to this.
>For the average working person with a life, where you have to miss work to show up in court, it's easier to just pay the stupid little >fee and go on with your functional life
It tends to be, and we tend to hear horror stories about being sued or facing charges. The thing is, those horror stories very rarely involve a situation where the individual is actually completely innocent, not at all responsible for the damages being claimed, etc. Those kinds of cases are usually very quickly settled with nothing more than an absentee motion for summary judgment, etc.
The problem arises when a party is actually guilty (or responsible, etc.) and seeks to mitigate the damage by persuading a court, using the legal system as a tool, etc.
If a case actually gets to the court-date point, let alone, goes for more than a single day, it is rarely if ever a simple matter of one party being completely innocent of what's being claimed against them by the other.
I have used such common misconceptions to my advantage from time to time, and prevailed.
>Yeah except I was watching the race when the accident happened and not once did they say "linux" and none of the camera shots showed a readable view
>of the sponsor logo (one side of the car being completely smashed).
Richard Petty tells a story about his last big crash where the only thing his sponsor (STP) had to say was how upset they were that their logo wasn't visible in any of the crash footage...
Something tells me the bonfire didn't include anything current from O'Reilly, Addison-Wesley, or Prentice-Hall PTR. Also unlikely to have included any popular (or vintage) RPG material, any collectible graphic novels, anything that has ever been on any high school required reading list, or anything that anyone acutually buys. I'd be willing to bet the contents of the bonfire are limited to overstocked books that were published as the extension of the writer's ego (e.g., I see large stacks of books by current politicians that nobody is expected to buy -- the value is in the perception that a stack of hardcover books generates), or various kinds of craft, collection, or coffee table books that tend to sit in the bargain aisle for years, that even the used bookstores won't take.
Now, if you told me the guy was burning a specific list of books that indicated a certain political statement, I would take a little interest. If you told me that the local government sanctioned this burning -but stipulated what books may and may not be burned- I'd pick up the torch and lead the protest. If you told me that the bookstore owner was burning somebody *else's* books without that person's consent, I'd expect civil and criminal action to follow.
As it happens, I'm merely amused that the bookstore owner got a ticket for having an unpermitted fire in a place where open fires of that type are illegal. It would have been ironic (but very unfunny) if the fire had gotten out of control and burned anything the owner considered "inventory."
I would support a law that required recycling in a situation like this. But all the comments that charity and libraries "should" take these books, don't come from a point of view that seems to understand just how useless a waste of space the sort of books that even a bookstore owner would destroy, really are.
Of course, no book is ever really useless
And it's sad to realize that paper was once considered so rare, that this was even conceivable.
>That said, there's a big difference between driving drunk from a club downtown where you have to drive through city traffic and driving
>drunk from a bar in the middle of nowhere; neither is good, but one clearly has less favorable odds than the other.
Right. Driving drunk through midtown traffic keeps you on your toes: You have to constantly make decisions, you have to negotiate the trip in spite of many police whose sole task is DUI response, and you have to deal with other drivers, many of whom are *also* driving across town after the standard (state-mandated) bar closing time. On the other hand, a drunk driving trip on a rural road allows the driver to become complacent, to neglect the fact that he is drunk, offers fewer, infrequent distractions and decisions that have to be made, and once he passes the DUI checkpoint at the city limits, if he can maintain a lane and keep a constant speed, he probably will make it without incident. I'm not sure which of these scenarios was supposed to have the more favorable odds...
Don't you remember when they were having people arrested for comparison shopping? Wasn't this the store that tried to forbid *writing down prices?*
The ONLY reason to shop at Best Buy is to buy their loss-leader music CDs and DVDs, but I'm not sure they still do that, and I don't buy cartel-produced entertainment anymore.
>[F]ederal laws regarding abortion are unconstitutional: It must be left up to the states.
In a recent ruling that most commentators regard as a victory for the anti-abortion movement, Justice Kennedy's comments actually assert that a woman has a Constitutional Right to an abortion (thereby justifying the ruling as a reasonable and proper restriction on this right.)
The pro-lifers celebrated, probably never reading more than headlines and hearing no more than the sound bites on this decision. They do not seem to have recognized this as a Pyrrhic victory, drawing a line that pretty much ends any hope for the pro-life movement to ever prevail at a state or federal level, and preserving the argument for the status quo that actually supports the pro-choice movement (the assertion that such a Constitutional Right exists, given by a Supreme Court Justice, is the strongest argument to date in support of abortion rights!) I thought this was absolutely ingenious. End the debate quietly, while appearing to settle it in favor of one side.
>What exactly are they going to teach.
Maybe they will accidentally teach people that the same laws protecting the industry can be used by individuals against the industry.
You're preaching to the choir, Lizard. I know there are good resources available. My point was, that there are people who also realize this, still using FORTRAN in scientific computing, and they think they have good reasons. I tend to think the whole field should be torn down and rebuilt from first principles, but I don't carry that kind of weight :-)
>as requested a comp sci program without most of the theory you mentioned.
That's not missing much for a BA; the only things I see missing are courses in formal grammars, automata, and algorithm analysis.
This school looks like it's training practitioners as opposed to scientists; and that's perfectly reasonable. A BS program would and should be heavy on the theory and should include a supporting science. At my current shop that science pretty much needs to be physics and it's really helpful if you studied chemistry. But then, what we do is actually science. I've been in the business world too, and I realize that in most IT jobs, 99.44% of everything learned in school either needs to be unlearned or else atrophies. Different worlds, of course.
>Not all developers have a background in Computer Science.
Here's yet another phenomenon. I don't expect someone who majors in English to go into Medicine. I respect the Engineering curriculum, but it bothers me that engineers often don't recognize that they are crossing fields when they become software developers. I wouldn't expect a computer scientist to be competent at material science, any more than I expect things to work the other way around.
>Why do I need to know about OS and compiler design to develop high level software for solving real problems?
You *don't* and that was not my point *at all*.
> I find the opposite to be true. A C++ programmer is able to move to C without much problems, but the oppose it just not true.
There are some very idiomatic elements to C++ that are not of obvious utility from a C programmer's point of view. This can even escape people who *Teach* C++. Some differences between C and C++ look tiny, but have enormous implications.
Consider a couple; const correctness, and the function-style casts.
There is a short list of specific things where C++ differs from C. So a programmer can basically write C in a C++ environment and get away with it. He can even make use of the type/class/object system, heap based memory allocation, etc. But these are really still superficial differences. The real differences don't present themselves so much as syntactic distinctions, and it is quite obvious when a C programmer writes "C in C++".
Likewise there are some big hurdles that a Java programmer has to get over before being a really effective C++ programmer, although in these cases, the whole OO-design idea has usually taken root; sometimes even more than is typically idiomatic for C++ -- you can tell when someone is thinking Java and writing C++ too.
Like I said, the differences can be subtle, but fundamental, and it really jumps off the screen when an experienced C++ programmer sees the work of another experienced C++ programmer, as opposed to the C++ of a java or C programmer. Hard to explain, but I suspect you know what I'm saying if you are one.
"Exactly... There are critical Cobol applications that run in a virtual machine in another virtual machine on big IBM iron that keep making money for big banks."
And this is an area where Linux, very quietly, penetrated. We're a lot closer to world domination than people seem to think
>I just started working in the actuarial department of an insurance company. Almost all of our code is in Fortran.
Ah, you work in the OTHER place where people routinely do calculus on the whiteboard and people who have a choice and know lots of languages, program in FORTRAN.
Surprised the hell out of me too.
For number-theoretic approaches to certain classes of problems, FORTRAN gives some guarantees, offers optimizations, has the widest range of libraries available, and scales in ways that aren't even a consideration in other idioms.
I hate FORTRAN as a grammar, but I certainly now have an appreciation of why it's used by the people who use it. Know what it took to make me realize this? I needed to be told by someone whose skills in other languages meets or exceeds my own. Then I understood; it's not that you have a golden hammer, know only one thing, and stick to it (that's what I thought FORTRAN was!). It's something else, and it has to do with the fact that we are easily deluded into thinking that a modern grammar equals an object better suited to task. It turns out to be true in some cases, but life-and-death-NOT-TRUE in others.
It would be scary to have someone naively think he could duplicate a math-intensive FORTRAN module with C or Java. How certain are you of the behavior of your language's exponentiation operator between quadruple precision floating point and an integer? Willing to bet your life on it? What does your language have built in for arbitrary precision? Willing to bet your life on that too?
How do you get out of university without taking an architecture course that gives some assembly language, at least for a hypothetical machine?
If you claim to have a BS in CS at the interview table, but didn't suffer through, e.g., a computer organization course (like Hennessy and Patterson style, which is common these days), didn't have a course where you developed an operating system, didn't design a language starting from BNF and build a compiler for it, didn't take 2 years of a lab science, didn't at least come close to a math minor, didn't have at least 4 courses at various levels of discrete math, automata, algorithm analyis, and didn't have a course that, as a final project, you deliver a significant user app in a high level language (on the order of an original multiplayer game, let's say)... I'd say your school has some explaining to do.
Seriously, what school can you go to and somehow avoid having a significant background in several languages and paradigms, including but certainly not limited to asm, C, and either C++ or Java, if not both? I don't expect everyone to take an elective where they compare Lisp, Scheme, Ruby, Haskell, and Icon. And I realize that there's often a variety of senior-year choices, and some people don't take Databases choosing HighPerf/Parallel/Distributed computing, say, or 3D Graphics. But there are some basic things that you'd better have done, or else, despite having the piece of paper hanging on your office wall, you're not done with school!
>Sure its a lot easier to program the same thing in a more modern language
:-)
:-)
:-)
Your other comments don't bear that out
I worked in a cobol shop (oil exploration corp, where I programmed in C on HP unix, and never actually touched cobol).
I don't mean to essentially repeat what you said, but it was obvious that business processes had been developed along with software, forms, management structure, controls, and so forth. The problem of replacing software systems wouldn't have been a simple matter of gathering requirements and developing modules to fit those requirements. That's the assumption that leads to the "WTF" factor when you tell the young'ns people still use COBOL. (And read my earlier rant on FORTRAN, which is today in active use, by people who choose it even though they are proficient in modern programming languages!)
On the other hand, there *were* instances where some mainframe COBOL apps were replaced with small desktop apps written in VB2.0 (showing my age, but I was mid-career when VB came out
I think some people think a "big project" is on the order of an OS or a GUI framework, and don't appreciate the scale of what's going on in the big business mainframe world, etc. I worked in that world for a good while, and I'm not even sure I fully comprehend the scale