Believe it or not, in the old days, we once learned how to "compute" sums, differences, products, even quotients using only a #2 pencil, paper and our very own brains (OK, some folks cheated and used fingers and toes, too)! It turned out that this style computing was often very adaptable to many different types of computing problems, typically with very little actual programming required. In fact, sometimes we'd arrive at the correct answer without any idea how we actually arrived!
That said, my first electricity driven, silicon-based computer was a TI/99a that I got on sale for $49.95 (with a $50.00 rebate from TI) in 1982 or '83. It had a whopping 16K of RAM, the ultra-intuitive ANSI BASIC and a casette tape drive interface for saving/restoring programs. Wow!
In a way, software design and development is "information physics." In that the best software 'understands' ('is apprpriate for' ?) all the properties of the information it processes. Incomplete knowledge/understanding of the underlying 'physics' of the information to be processed leads to inferior software.
This concept may also apply to the real world interfaces used by software by thinking of the various interactions with the real world (user interface, communications, attacks, defenses, storage/retrieval methods, etc) as other types of information, whose 'physics' must also be understood in order to make good software.
In the sense I'm using the term, understanding 'information physics' is no less important for a software designer than is understanding material, structural, and geological physics (at a minimum) are to a bridge, tunnel or building designer.
...I wonder if a descendent of the guy who designed the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge (aka Galloping Gertie) is now working at Microsoft, designing security for Internet Explorer...
As a person with vision problems, I [mostly] like slashdot's layout, because when I zoom the text to a size I can read, I don't end up with a bunch of one, two and three word sentences stacked (and overlapping sometimes) within a tiny column. The Onion (and far too many other sites) have forgotten that the USER/VIEWER was originally intended to be in charge of the formatting and layout of their content. That was the wonderful promise of something like XML. By separating the content markup from the layout commands, it is [relatively] easy for the user to choose how to view content. Not so on all crappy sites that have fixed pixel width columns and large amounts of "text as graphics" that even a browser with as good a zoom feature as Opera cannot make "unfuzzy" when zoomed large.
I'm praying that the/. redesign will not forget its visually impaired readers like so many other sites (such as The Onion) have done. Fixed size columns, tables and things like that just aren't good when viewed with text sizes of three or four hundred percent!
That's something I need to explain to customers all the time. They (like much of the press) believe MS's ad-speak about Windows compatibility. Unfortunately, for almost anything that does something useful (or fun? (like games)) every flavor of Windows (sometimes even from one service pack to another) can behave just differently enough to crash programs. It is often just as likely (if not more) that a linux program will compile (and work) on Windows than a program written specifically for Windows!
I don't know if this is still true, but when I first saw an MSCE taining module for Windows NT TCP/IP, it contained a number of WRONG answers. By wrong, I mean that Windows NT did not work the way the MSECE module required one to answer -- however -- the MSCE matched MS's [incorrect] documentation. I gained my knowledge of those things (I don't recall specifics, so don't ask) by developing Windows NT software that used TCP/IP for a number of years (since NT 3.1 went gold, in fact), yet I'd nearly fail the sample test if I answered all of the questions as NT actually worked.
If any of the existing tests exhibit this same bias, then the certs are less than useless. They would, in fact, be harmful by teaching the way things should be instead of the way things are.
Google's maps seem to be missing at least one fundamental map feature: a scale of distance. They have a nifty slider and a not-so-nifty scrolling feature (I cannot find any way to select my own center point (never mind, just discovered I can clikc'n'drag)). But they are lacking anything that would allow me to estimate the distance between two points on the map. At last a standard scale can be used for guessing. A TRULY fancy feature would be an option to click on start, and have the display dynamically highlight the route and show the distance... If anyone can do it, the Googlites can, right? (smile)
That would still leave an equal number of on-topic articles discarded, perhaps because they conflicted with the predetermined results. I just wanted to point out (as others have done) that, even though the referenced article in Science seems to indicate otherwise, there are many dissenting views. And many of them are not from crackpots but from other scientists.
Personally, I believe that the planetary temperature cycles are being ignored in 'popular' press, in favor of blaming everything on man. We definitely are polluting the planet more than it would on its own, but are we accelerating a 30,000 year cycle up so much that we don't have time to take our time looking for solutions? That is truly difficult to imagine.
OTOH, it is a good thing man came on the scene, otherwise (without all man's help with warming) the world would still be locked in an ice age, right?;-)
According to some, the 'analysis' was slanted to support the desired results (notice footnote #9 and wonder who decides if a paper is 'about climate change'). For more (and other fun reading) visit: http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/120604.shtml
I interviewed for a job with a tax software company that told me they expected all developers to work 60-80+ hour weeks pretty much from mid-November to mid-January (every year) in order to get all the final changes in their tax software. Given the comments throughout this discussion, I'm now very worried about the quality of tax preparation software -- with that kind of work load, one should assume it is full of errors and bugs. Either that, or there are people who can work that kind of hours -- even during the most hectic time of the year, no less.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
That concept is the teflon lining the slippery slope to totalitarianism.
Believe it or not, in the old days, we once learned how to "compute" sums, differences, products, even quotients using only a #2 pencil, paper and our very own brains (OK, some folks cheated and used fingers and toes, too)! It turned out that this style computing was often very adaptable to many different types of computing problems, typically with very little actual programming required. In fact, sometimes we'd arrive at the correct answer without any idea how we actually arrived!
That said, my first electricity driven, silicon-based computer was a TI/99a that I got on sale for $49.95 (with a $50.00 rebate from TI) in 1982 or '83. It had a whopping 16K of RAM, the ultra-intuitive ANSI BASIC and a casette tape drive interface for saving/restoring programs. Wow!
I wonder if AOL users do any better on the Turing Test than the worm does?
In a way, software design and development is "information physics." In that the best software 'understands' ('is apprpriate for' ?) all the properties of the information it processes. Incomplete knowledge/understanding of the underlying 'physics' of the information to be processed leads to inferior software.
This concept may also apply to the real world interfaces used by software by thinking of the various interactions with the real world (user interface, communications, attacks, defenses, storage/retrieval methods, etc) as other types of information, whose 'physics' must also be understood in order to make good software.
In the sense I'm using the term, understanding 'information physics' is no less important for a software designer than is understanding material, structural, and geological physics (at a minimum) are to a bridge, tunnel or building designer.
...I wonder if a descendent of the guy who designed the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge (aka Galloping Gertie) is now working at Microsoft, designing security for Internet Explorer...
As a person with vision problems, I [mostly] like slashdot's layout, because when I zoom the text to a size I can read, I don't end up with a bunch of one, two and three word sentences stacked (and overlapping sometimes) within a tiny column. The Onion (and far too many other sites) have forgotten that the USER/VIEWER was originally intended to be in charge of the formatting and layout of their content. That was the wonderful promise of something like XML. By separating the content markup from the layout commands, it is [relatively] easy for the user to choose how to view content. Not so on all crappy sites that have fixed pixel width columns and large amounts of "text as graphics" that even a browser with as good a zoom feature as Opera cannot make "unfuzzy" when zoomed large.
I'm praying that the /. redesign will not forget its visually impaired readers like so many other sites (such as The Onion) have done. Fixed size columns, tables and things like that just aren't good when viewed with text sizes of three or four hundred percent!
That's something I need to explain to customers all the time. They (like much of the press) believe MS's ad-speak about Windows compatibility. Unfortunately, for almost anything that does something useful (or fun? (like games)) every flavor of Windows (sometimes even from one service pack to another) can behave just differently enough to crash programs. It is often just as likely (if not more) that a linux program will compile (and work) on Windows than a program written specifically for Windows!
If any of the existing tests exhibit this same bias, then the certs are less than useless. They would, in fact, be harmful by teaching the way things should be instead of the way things are.
Google's maps seem to be missing at least one fundamental map feature: a scale of distance. They have a nifty slider and a not-so-nifty scrolling feature (I cannot find any way to select my own center point (never mind, just discovered I can clikc'n'drag)). But they are lacking anything that would allow me to estimate the distance between two points on the map. At last a standard scale can be used for guessing. A TRULY fancy feature would be an option to click on start, and have the display dynamically highlight the route and show the distance... If anyone can do it, the Googlites can, right? (smile)
...2048 free hours...
That must be used in the first two months...
That would still leave an equal number of on-topic articles discarded, perhaps because they conflicted with the predetermined results. I just wanted to point out (as others have done) that, even though the referenced article in Science seems to indicate otherwise, there are many dissenting views. And many of them are not from crackpots but from other scientists.
;-)
Personally, I believe that the planetary temperature cycles are being ignored in 'popular' press, in favor of blaming everything on man. We definitely are polluting the planet more than it would on its own, but are we accelerating a 30,000 year cycle up so much that we don't have time to take our time looking for solutions? That is truly difficult to imagine.
OTOH, it is a good thing man came on the scene, otherwise (without all man's help with warming) the world would still be locked in an ice age, right?
According to some, the 'analysis' was slanted to support the desired results (notice footnote #9 and wonder who decides if a paper is 'about climate change'). For more (and other fun reading) visit: http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/120604.shtml
I interviewed for a job with a tax software company that told me they expected all developers to work 60-80+ hour weeks pretty much from mid-November to mid-January (every year) in order to get all the final changes in their tax software. Given the comments throughout this discussion, I'm now very worried about the quality of tax preparation software -- with that kind of work load, one should assume it is full of errors and bugs. Either that, or there are people who can work that kind of hours -- even during the most hectic time of the year, no less.