Governments typically ask companies to bid on things that may or may not be possible, then force them to put a price on it. Now you want them to be sued as well?
Since I am not CS person (Business, rather), I won't attempt to to argue with you about that.
Here is a business-like analogy: How hard is it to divide roman numerals? It's not easy. There are dozens of rules to memorize in order to make it work. Compare this to using Arabic numerals, where you only have to memorize two rules.
However, I think that any reasonable person would recognize that this Tower of Babel approach is holding back software development as a whole, needlessly fragmenting knowledge and impacting the careers of excellent programmers simply because they didn't jump on the latest bandwagon X years ago.
Yes, this is a big problem. But the issue isn't the "Tower of Babel" so much as a misunderstanding of the domains in which a tool can work well, which ultimately leads to "churn". There is an old joke along the lines of "Any sufficiently complex software project implements a buggy version of half of Lisp". There is some truth to that. Lisp is a language that allows abstraction over basically any term. This is something that imperative/OO programmers want, but they don't know how to say (and they tend to cover their ears screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" when academics tell them the problem was solved in the 1960s). So they build up ad hoc solutions to quantify over specific terms. Each of these operations is potentially tricky and buggy. The "Tower of Babel" is a consequence of this. Some of it is legitimate -- new languages can provide better tools (that is, new ways to quantify) to increase productivity. But benefits only accrue if businesses switch to them, at a potentially high cost.
What you're describing is heretical. Contrary to the Christian tradition of billions of people. "Perhaps" you are right. No "real" Christian would agree, and they are the ones who have a say in the matter.
If you don't know the difference between an ale and a lager, you have no business suggesting how to serve beer. First, it is lagers that are typically double fermented. Indeed, secondary fermentation is called "lagering". Using a secondary is quite rare for ales, unless you are going for a high gravity brew. There is no such thing as a "real ale". The German beer laws are as close as you are going to get; but they include lagers, and they exclude dozens of great varieties of things that should probably be called beers (like the Lambics).
Please STFU. You give beer snobs a bad name -- pretentious.
who didn't know that dropping a zero gave him 10% (something I considered until then to be fairly basic)
Dropping a zero from what? Off the end of 100%? Nobody talks that way. You might consider it "basic", but it is utterly arbitrary.
Did you consider that he thought you were going to drop a zero score from his results? (As in, "I drop the lowest homework score"). It is most definitely not true that dropping a zero score yields 10%, or a 10% improvement. Did you consider that your poor expression lead to this student's confusion? Probably not.
Anyone who thinks the bees solved NP-hard problem here does not know what they're talking about...
Those bees did not do an exhaustive search for the optimal path, only one that is 'good enough'. Computers can do the same with any decent algorithm.
Solving an NP-hard problem does not mean you do an exhaustive search. In fact, exhaustive searches are rather the bane of NP hard problems. If you could solve an NP hard problem without an exhaustive search, it would be strong evidence that P = NP.
Solving an NP hard problem means you always find the optimal solution. If the bees' "good enough" solution is optimal, they have solved it.
I believe the bee's have an advantage over the typical traveling salesman problem in that the bee's are finding the shortest path on a fully connected or complete graph.
The TSP handles disconnected components very simply: you don't visit them. How could you? They aren't connected to the road network.
Now if the salesman was given a helicopter to move like the bee does, the problem would be reduced to a basic optimization problem.
TSP is a basic optimization problem. It just happens to be hard. And moving to helicopters doesn't change the mathematical content of the problem. Guess what: helicopters travel in paths too! And you still need to run a circuit between multiple cities.
But they're not shouting through a bullhorn. They're "silently" and "invisibly" transmitting over the air, using a protocol they probably assume is secure. It is not obvious to anyone if a stream is encrypted until you try to read from it. It is like a burglar turning the knob on your front door, checking to see if you left it unlocked.
If someone stands at their front door with bullhorn shouting out their social security numbers, salaries, sexual orientation and other private details, it isn't the responsibility of passers-by to cover their ears.
This is more like Google was going door to door, knocking on doors, turning knobs to see if they're unlocked, and sometimes going in and swiping souvenirs.
You see, an unlocked door is not an invitation to break in. The victim has some share of the blame, but the burglar gets most of it.
Writing a parser is trivially easy, WHEN THE GRAMMAR TO BE PARSED IS DEFINED. If it isn't defined, you have a lot of work ahead of you. A poor designer will end up with an incomplete ad hoc grammar, which will potentially behave in unexpected ways. These are exactly the kinds of questions a "parser writer" needs to be asking.
And how can thirteen hundred hours be entered as 1:30 PM? If this is a functional requirement, you need to state it as such. This is yet another special case.
Asking these questions is expensive. Having people answer them makes you a pariah ("What, are you stupid?" indeed) Libraries are cheaper.
Snow Leopard is $29. Really, there is no excuse to still be on 10.5. The whole point of making Snow Leopard cheap was so that everyone would be on the same release.
If you have an Intel Mac you should be on 10.6. Period.
You can give me 29$, since you feel so strongly about it.
Don't use mixed case either, unless it is mandated (WHY do they do this?)
Um, because there's more mixed case strings than single case strings. So hackers have to search through more strings to find your password.
It is much easier to remember or write down a slightly longer single case alphanumeric password than a password with mixed case and special characters of equivalent strength.
Except they're not equivalent strength if the English text is just slightly longer. English utterances have about 1.5 bits of entropy per character. This is even lower if you restrict yourself to lowercase. Arbitrary strings have 8 bits per character.
Please don't lecture us on security again. Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
Governments typically ask companies to bid on things that may or may not be possible, then force them to put a price on it. Now you want them to be sued as well?
Yes. They're free to not bid, right?
QUACK
Since I am not CS person (Business, rather), I won't attempt to to argue with you about that.
Here is a business-like analogy: How hard is it to divide roman numerals? It's not easy. There are dozens of rules to memorize in order to make it work. Compare this to using Arabic numerals, where you only have to memorize two rules.
However, I think that any reasonable person would recognize that this Tower of Babel approach is holding back software development as a whole, needlessly fragmenting knowledge and impacting the careers of excellent programmers simply because they didn't jump on the latest bandwagon X years ago.
Yes, this is a big problem. But the issue isn't the "Tower of Babel" so much as a misunderstanding of the domains in which a tool can work well, which ultimately leads to "churn". There is an old joke along the lines of "Any sufficiently complex software project implements a buggy version of half of Lisp". There is some truth to that. Lisp is a language that allows abstraction over basically any term. This is something that imperative/OO programmers want, but they don't know how to say (and they tend to cover their ears screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" when academics tell them the problem was solved in the 1960s). So they build up ad hoc solutions to quantify over specific terms. Each of these operations is potentially tricky and buggy. The "Tower of Babel" is a consequence of this. Some of it is legitimate -- new languages can provide better tools (that is, new ways to quantify) to increase productivity. But benefits only accrue if businesses switch to them, at a potentially high cost.
What you're describing is heretical. Contrary to the Christian tradition of billions of people. "Perhaps" you are right. No "real" Christian would agree, and they are the ones who have a say in the matter.
If you don't know the difference between an ale and a lager, you have no business suggesting how to serve beer. First, it is lagers that are typically double fermented. Indeed, secondary fermentation is called "lagering". Using a secondary is quite rare for ales, unless you are going for a high gravity brew. There is no such thing as a "real ale". The German beer laws are as close as you are going to get; but they include lagers, and they exclude dozens of great varieties of things that should probably be called beers (like the Lambics).
Please STFU. You give beer snobs a bad name -- pretentious.
who didn't know that dropping a zero gave him 10% (something I considered until then to be fairly basic)
Dropping a zero from what? Off the end of 100%? Nobody talks that way. You might consider it "basic", but it is utterly arbitrary.
Did you consider that he thought you were going to drop a zero score from his results? (As in, "I drop the lowest homework score"). It is most definitely not true that dropping a zero score yields 10%, or a 10% improvement. Did you consider that your poor expression lead to this student's confusion? Probably not.
Our entire property system is based on the notion of physical property.
No it's not. This is demonstrably false. Indeed, copyright was introduced to American law by the United States Constitution.
I mean...is it not a requirement for those coming to this country, to attain citizenship to show on the exams, a proficiency in English??
No. America doesn't have an "official" language.
The India we know today is not the India of antiquity. The Persian Empire controlled much of the Indian subcontinent during the time of Alexander.
OH SHI...
It has a steering wheel, doesn't it?
It's not a "missing case". The TSP just says to visit each of the nodes, in a Hamiltonian circuit. They are always connected graphs.
Anyone who thinks the bees solved NP-hard problem here does not know what they're talking about...
Those bees did not do an exhaustive search for the optimal path, only one that is 'good enough'. Computers can do the same with any decent algorithm.
Solving an NP-hard problem does not mean you do an exhaustive search. In fact, exhaustive searches are rather the bane of NP hard problems. If you could solve an NP hard problem without an exhaustive search, it would be strong evidence that P = NP.
Solving an NP hard problem means you always find the optimal solution. If the bees' "good enough" solution is optimal, they have solved it.
I believe the bee's have an advantage over the typical traveling salesman problem in that the bee's are finding the shortest path on a fully connected or complete graph.
The TSP handles disconnected components very simply: you don't visit them. How could you? They aren't connected to the road network.
Now if the salesman was given a helicopter to move like the bee does, the problem would be reduced to a basic optimization problem.
TSP is a basic optimization problem. It just happens to be hard. And moving to helicopters doesn't change the mathematical content of the problem. Guess what: helicopters travel in paths too! And you still need to run a circuit between multiple cities.
Microsoft makes personal music players?
I really need a work ..
Which languages do you know? Any Haskell?
But they're not shouting through a bullhorn. They're "silently" and "invisibly" transmitting over the air, using a protocol they probably assume is secure. It is not obvious to anyone if a stream is encrypted until you try to read from it. It is like a burglar turning the knob on your front door, checking to see if you left it unlocked.
If someone stands at their front door with bullhorn shouting out their social security numbers, salaries, sexual orientation and other private details, it isn't the responsibility of passers-by to cover their ears.
This is more like Google was going door to door, knocking on doors, turning knobs to see if they're unlocked, and sometimes going in and swiping souvenirs.
You see, an unlocked door is not an invitation to break in. The victim has some share of the blame, but the burglar gets most of it.
Writing a parser is trivially easy, WHEN THE GRAMMAR TO BE PARSED IS DEFINED. If it isn't defined, you have a lot of work ahead of you. A poor designer will end up with an incomplete ad hoc grammar, which will potentially behave in unexpected ways. These are exactly the kinds of questions a "parser writer" needs to be asking.
And how can thirteen hundred hours be entered as 1:30 PM? If this is a functional requirement, you need to state it as such. This is yet another special case.
Asking these questions is expensive. Having people answer them makes you a pariah ("What, are you stupid?" indeed) Libraries are cheaper.
Snow Leopard is $29. Really, there is no excuse to still be on 10.5. The whole point of making Snow Leopard cheap was so that everyone would be on the same release.
If you have an Intel Mac you should be on 10.6. Period.
You can give me 29$, since you feel so strongly about it.
That may or may not be a bad thing. It is important that prices reflect the supply and scarcity of a resource, or else we will run out of it.
And, if there's a difference between two numbers, by definition they are not the same. QED
Fail. Take a class in analysis.
Don't use mixed case either, unless it is mandated (WHY do they do this?)
Um, because there's more mixed case strings than single case strings. So hackers have to search through more strings to find your password.
It is much easier to remember or write down a slightly longer single case alphanumeric password than a password with mixed case and special characters of equivalent strength.
Except they're not equivalent strength if the English text is just slightly longer. English utterances have about 1.5 bits of entropy per character. This is even lower if you restrict yourself to lowercase. Arbitrary strings have 8 bits per character.
Please don't lecture us on security again. Thanks!
Chicks are interested in my penis, not my clothes. Find better chicks.