You were hired to rewrite some VB software, but you're not familiar with VB? The problem isn't VB, it's you.
Actually, the problem is whoever hires people who are qualified for task A to do task B.
This is a perfect example of the difference between a university-educated computer scientist, and a graduate of a 6-month "tech college" program. The community college drone has only been taught how to use one or two tools to perform common tasks, whereas the computer scientist is taught to truly understand the tools, as well as the thinking that went into them, how to use them to solve multiple abstract classes of problems (instead of just a few common, specific problems), and how to apply that knowledge to use tools they haven't seen yet.
A real computer scientist doesn't care what language they work in. A good employer should know that when they hire the 6-month grad at $18/hr, they're getting a code monkey that can do only what is explictly listed on their resume. They know that when they spend the extra money for a computer scientist with an actual degree, they expect that programmer to be much more capable, flexible, and adaptable. The fact that they've never programmed in VB before is nothing more than a minor roadblock. Send them to Borders/Indigo/Chapters with $50, tell them to pick up an O'Reilly or Knox book on VB, leave them alone for a couple days, and they should then be able to apply all their learning in the new language.
A fair argument against VB6 is that it's at end-of-life.
Got a link to back that up? VB support has already extended into.NET, and as their flagship programming product, I'd be very surprised if they were planning on dropping it. After all, more people program in VB than any other language. Why would Microsoft turn their backs on their biggest customer base?
How about implementing international standards for collision avoidance similar to what exists in the marine world, e.g., If approaching head-on, both vector starboard, if approaching at right/oblique angles, the one to starboard descends (if altitude and terrain allows) and the one to port ascends. Seems simple to me.
Of course, the ideal solution is to stick to your flight plan when flying IFR, keeping your eyes open when flying VFR and when flying VFR stay within VFR conditions, keeping your eyes open all the while, and fly conservatively.
Perhaps it's different in the US, but in Canada, you should never be in a "head-on" collision situation while VFR (or IFR, for that matter). In Canada, VFR aircraft on eastbound headings (0 - 179 degrees magnetic) must fly at odd-thousands plus 500 feet altitudes. Aircraft flying westbound (180 - 359 degrees magnetic) fly at even-thousands plus 500. This assures a 1000 foot vertical separation between opposite-facing traffic. IFR traffic flies at even and odd thousands (without the "plus 500").
And most flights are probably done 95% on autopilot these days.
For certain, almost all commercial flights employ autopilot for at least some segments of the flight. But certainly nowhere near 95% of all flights use autopilot. Don't underestimate the number of GA (General Aviation, a.k.a. "Private Pilots") out there flying for kicks and convenience.
The solution's actually quite simple: you just don't tell them that there's no "real" pilot.
That's precisely why at some point during every flight when I have to travel, I run up and bang on the cockpit door, demanding that they open it so I can see the pilots.
The pilot was doing a low pass for an air show, gave the engines throttle, and the computer on the Airbus 320 decided "no".
According to the Wiki article you linked to, it doesn't specify that "the computer decided 'no'," but rather it indicates that Airbus released a service bulletin alerting of anomolous behaviour with the engines. It could easily have been mechanical. Furthermore, turbofan engines such as those used on jet airplanes do not spool up to full power instantaneously like internal combustion engines. They require a few seconds to smoothly get up to speed and begin producing thrust.
The pilot should ALWAYS be free to override systems, and you should have a really, really, really REALLY good reason for putting any logic into control systems.
The pilots of American Airlines Flight 587 might disagree with you, if they'd survived the crash. The pilots commanded an excessive degree of rudder input while experiencing wake turbulence, which overstressed the airframe and caused a portion of the tail section to break free. If the computers had been allowed to override the pilots' input, it may have prevented the overstressing of the airframe, and while the passengers may have been tossed around a little bit more, the rudder would not have broken off, and the plane could have escaped the turbulence.
there is a BIG red button on the control yolk that
They're not flying an egg. It's a "yoke."
We also have a huge, peer-reviewed system for continuously training pilots in all aspects of flying; pilot's associations, company training and bulletins on safety, procedures, etc in most airlines, and word of mouth.
I assume you're referring to professional, commercial carrier pilots. There certainly is no such "continuous training program" for private pilots. Only some lax currency requirements.
My wife and I almost never watch live TV. Virtually everything we watch is pre-recorded (the exception being the odd hockey game). When we watch the shows we've recorded, we never watch the commercials. We fast foward through them all, as quickly as possible. I don't care if they're funny or amusing; they're still trying to sell me something. I just want to get back to my show.
We notice an amusing side-effect of this whenever we go out to the movies (once every 3 months or so), because we don't recognize any of the posters for upcoming movies! Virtually all the previews we see in the theater are brand new to us. The only reason we know about new movies at all is by media buzz ('Da Vinci Code,' 'Brokeback Mountain', or word of mouth from friends ("Did you know they're making another X-Men sequel?"). It's kind of funny, and the first time we noticed it, it really reminded us of how dramatically our viewing habits have changed thanks to the PVR.
The two cameras are at a security gate leading into the Pentagon. They're intended to capture images of cars and drivers passing through the checkpoint. For example, at one point in the video, a police car passes through the gate. The video very clearly captures this.
It's not intended to capture anything far away. Just who/what passes through that particular checkpoint.
The fundermental problem is that no such steel framed building has ever totally collapsed due to fire in over a century, except on that one day.
This is a fact that has greatly troubled architects and engineers since 9/11. The collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 invalidated many assumptions that had been used in building construction. Building designers have used to the lessons 9/11 to improve future building construction.
That said, the buildings probably would have stood up to the heat of the fire if the insulating foam on the steel skeleton had been maintained, and not allowed to flake off over the years, leaving the trusses vulnerable to fire and intense heat.
Even though there have been fires in such buildings before and since, including one in the 1970's in one of the WTC towers.
The fires the buildings were designed to withstand (and, as you point out, had withstood in the past) were not nearly as intense. A fire in a building like that was expected to be started by a careless cigarette butt (it was the 70's, after all) or an electrical short, or a grease fire in the kitchen. Whatever the case, the fire's fuel was expected to be limited to the furniture and carpet already in the building, thus limiting the potential intensity of the fire.
They never expected to need to stand up to a fire fueled by thousands and thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
WTC7 wasn't even hit by a plane, there is even reason to doubt that the impact damage to WTC1 and WTC2 was sufficent to greatly greatly weaken the structure.
You know what else is scary? I've seen video of buildings collapsing when they weren't on fire at all! I think something called an "earthquake" shook the ground a teeny tiny bit, and the buildings just fell down all on their own!
Hey... wait a minute... do you think maybe the nearby collapse of two massive skyscrapers might cause enough of an "earthquake" effect to weaken a building, such that subsequent debris damage and fire might cause it to collapse?
Certainly once you *get* the plane close to the ground, it might be easy. But certainly not a simple task to bring a what, massive plane like a 757 (were not talking a Cessna here) down to the ground. "Ease it to the ground", key word is "ease".
Easing a plane into a smooth descent is trivial. With the plane trimmed for straight and level flight (which it already would have been once they'd taken over), you simply retard the throttles. The plane will maintain the same airspeed, and begin a descent. The speed of the descent is controlled merely by advancing or retarding the throttles.
Elsewhere I've read that these "rookie" pilots were able to maneuver these planes in some fantastically tight turns - beginners luck?
No, merely a complete disregard for the intended performance envelope of the aircraft. Pilots need to keep the various flight parameters (angle of attack, bank, airspeed, G-loading) within certain parameters. If you exceed them, then the plane must be taken out of service and thoroughly inspected before being certified as airworthy again. The hijackers didn't care about this, so they simply exceeded the intended limitations, producing turns and speeds not normally seen in aircraft of that size. Thus, the result looked "extraordinary," because it was not safe, and never seen before.
how did WTC 7, and the others, neatly collapse
You felt they should have tipped over? Do you have any idea how much the upper portion of the towers must have weighed? Without any sideways torquing force, how would the tower have begun leaning enough to "tip over," as everyone appears to have expected it to do? The only force acting on the tower was gravity (OK, maybe a little bit of wind). Gravity pulling straight down on several hundred thousand tons of steel and concrete... where would you expect it to go, other than straight down?
WTC7 was constructed using the same materials and methodologies as the other towers. Conventional engineering wisdom indicated that such "foam insulated steel trusses" would stand up to fire. This "wisdom" had never actually been tested on a full-scale, and unfortunately, it turned out to be wrong.
The steel truss supports within the structure of the buildings was coated with a hardened fire-proof foam designed to protect the crucial skeletal structure in the event of a fire. However, given the age of the buildings, the foam protection had been drying out and flaking off for several years. Maintenance had been lax, and the foam had not been replaced. Thus, when the fires broke out, the steel framing did not have the benefit of its insulation, and it could not hold up to the heat of the fire. The steel weakened and collapsed.
As I said, these design techniques had never been tested on a full-scale. They'd simply been assumed to work. Large-scale building designers learned a great deal from the results of 9/11, and you can rest assured that newer building construction takes the lessons into account. Many other buildings in NY had been built using similar designs, and they've since had their foam insulation thoroughly inspected and replaced, where necessary.
You can't put the conspiracy theories to rest. They already believe you're covering something up. [...]The conspiracy theorists will just claim you've fabricated or altered the "new" evidence.
Sounds a lot like how religion deals with evidence supporting evolution.
Just a second. I know the Java sources have been available for a long time in src.zip. I've consulted it many-a-time. But what about the native code? You know, the actual runtime itself, and all the C code that goes behind all those "native" methods in the Java runtime? Is that code available now too? That's the code you'd really need access to in order to port the JRE to a new platform.
Swing is a joke. It doesn't look native, it is a resource hog
1995 called. They want your complaints back.
You know, back when Java first debuted, its critics complained that it ran too slow. This was back when everyone was running 486 DX/100's, and Pentium 75's were just coming onto the market. Advocates of Java countered that hardware would soon be fast enough to render Java's slight speed disadvantage (due to being interpreted code) irrelevant. Plus, a JIT compiler was in the works to make Java run just as fast as native code.
Guess what? They were right. We're not running 100 MHz machines anymore. We're running 2.4 GHz machines, and Java is just as quick and responsive as any other app. Today's machines have way more than enough CPU power and memory capacity to run even the largest Java apps with no delays at all.
Time for you to come up with some new, fresh complaints.
I don't think I would need to study for this competition, in college I never studied for a computer science exam.
Nor an English exam, apparently.
It was my theory that if I couldn't deduce the problem on the fly, then I shouldn't be coding at all.
Deducing problems is easy. Deducing the solutions, however, is much harder. And believing you can do it without the benefit of the pioneers that came before you is arrogant and closed-minded. It's not about "memorizing" the work of Knuth, Tanenbaum, Stroustrup, etc., but rather learning why their solutions work. I didn't "memorize" that 2^5=32. It just does. I understand it.
Coding isn't about regurgitation or memorization, it's about how you instinctively attack a problem.
And university is about learning the best practices and tactics that have been discovered and published by those who came before you, and learning how to apply those techniques to problem-solve. Its not about "instinctively" attacking a problem, but rather using the research and study that came before you to improve those instincts. Widening your horizon. Expanding your toolbox.
Certain courses can't make you memorize stuff to be a better coder but they can give you a bag of tricks or arsenol with which to attack problems.
Yes, and those are the things you should be studying. But you claimed you never studied for a computer science exam. Now you're contradicting yourself, but you still sound arrogant.
Why waste concentration on memorization when you have instant access to all your past work right at your fingertips?
Why limit yourself to only consulting your own past solutions when there are decades of well-documented research into innovative, ingenius, and non-intuitive solutions that smarter people (Kernigan, Ritchie, Knuth, Torvalds, Tanenbaum, etc.) have already figured out and written out for you to learn? I think that was the parent poster's point.
It's stupid to ignore the wealth of knowledge and experience already learned the hard way because you discard it as merely "memorizing." It's not. If you study the problem and learn why the solution works, you've just made yourself into a better coder. I didn't "memorize" how Huffman Encoding works. I learned why it works, and I probably wouldn't have figured it out on my own. But it's one of the tools I can use now, because I understand it. I learned it.
It's arrogant, ignorant, and shortsighted to believe you can just "teach yourself" and "figure out" perfect solutions to all the potential programming problems you'll encounter, while ignoring all the work done (and published) by the computer science and mathematical luminaries that preceded you.
I'm not sure if similar actions are widespread in the US yet, but up here, Canadian ISPs already discriminate based on content. Ports used by popuplar P2P software is throttled to the point where throughput is almost choked off completely. Many Rogers subscribers have found a way to "hack" their torrent bandwidth back to normal, at least temporarily, by using the same port Rogers is using for their new VOIP service.
Resistance seems futile, as no ISP wants their users using P2P apps. What can we do? We used to threaten to cancel our services with providers guilty of bandwidth throttling, but now they all do it, so what options are left, besides simply accepting that this is how the future of the Internet will be? Normal access to "preferred" sites that make the ISP money, and discouraged (throttled) access to sites and services that cost the ISP money. It sucks. I'm open to suggestions.
I am saying Americans are TOO HYGENIC. Or to elaborate: - Washing yourself? Every day a shower.
Look, I know this is Slashdot, but you can't criticise people for not exercising, and say they shower too much. If you want them to exercise more, then trust me, one shower every 2 or 3 days is not going to cut it. I shower daily even if I haven't exercised on that day. Days on which I do exercise, I shower twice (the usual one in the morning to start the day, and again after exercising).
Heck, sometimes in the summer, I occassionally even shower 3 times in a single day (the morning shower, after an afternoon workout, and one more right before bed if it's hot and muggy).
Showering doesn't make a person unhealthy. It makes them less stinky.
how it is that the USA can have a 60% obesity rate.
Small nit, but "obese" != "overweight." According to this table (admittedly out of date, but clearly shows the trend), 64.5% of Americans are "overweight." Only 30.5% are "obese." There's a difference.
Resturants, Fast Food, and the Lazy lifestyle of Americans (I know I am desperately trying to get my life rearranged to sanity right now) is the biggest problem.
Let me get this straight. Americans take far less time off than their European counterparts (10 days to their 28), and work a bunch of free overtime that's unheard of on the other side of the pond, and it's the Americans who are lazy? I don't follow.
Has it occurred to you that the reason American diets are suffering, and that people opt for the quick, cheap, convenient food that isn't as healthy might be precisely because they have much less personal time than their hard-working (with triple the vacation time) UK brethren?
All veggies are far better fresh.
I agree, but they're not always available. I don't know where you are geographically, but in my neck of the woods (Canada), it gets pretty hard to find "fresh" green peppers in February. I suppose you'll look down on me for settling for peppers that were picked pre-ripened in Mexico, then shipped to Canada, where I bought them 5 days later? How lazy of me to not grow my own peppers in the dead of winter!
I'm guessing you live someplace where it's toasty warm, year round?
Americans eat very little fish
As they should. Studies show that our waters are so contaminated with lead and mercury that you shouldn't eat fresh fish more than once per week.
Our food sucks because we are too damned lazy to learn how to cook right.
No, it's because we spend 9 hours at work, only get 10 vacation days a year, and would prefer to spend our free hours spending quality bonding time with our family than slaving over a stove making something "fresh."
Americans will not take 1 hour out of the mid-day to go to the farmers market to get fresh food,
1 hour! Are you nuts? We only get 30 minutes for lunch. Anything longer than that, and we have to stay late to make it up. And how "fresh" will those veggies be after sitting in my warm office all afternoon?
last I knew, the '555' exchange was reserved for special purposes, like information
In many area codes, it is. But not all. Go here and enter "555" in the "Prefix" field, then click "Search by Number." While there are indeed a few "DIRASST" entries in the City/Switch Name column, there are also a lot of legitimate locales which use the prefix for general phone numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
You were hired to rewrite some VB software, but you're not familiar with VB? The problem isn't VB, it's you.
Actually, the problem is whoever hires people who are qualified for task A to do task B.
This is a perfect example of the difference between a university-educated computer scientist, and a graduate of a 6-month "tech college" program. The community college drone has only been taught how to use one or two tools to perform common tasks, whereas the computer scientist is taught to truly understand the tools, as well as the thinking that went into them, how to use them to solve multiple abstract classes of problems (instead of just a few common, specific problems), and how to apply that knowledge to use tools they haven't seen yet.
A real computer scientist doesn't care what language they work in. A good employer should know that when they hire the 6-month grad at $18/hr, they're getting a code monkey that can do only what is explictly listed on their resume. They know that when they spend the extra money for a computer scientist with an actual degree, they expect that programmer to be much more capable, flexible, and adaptable. The fact that they've never programmed in VB before is nothing more than a minor roadblock. Send them to Borders/Indigo/Chapters with $50, tell them to pick up an O'Reilly or Knox book on VB, leave them alone for a couple days, and they should then be able to apply all their learning in the new language.
A fair argument against VB6 is that it's at end-of-life.
.NET, and as their flagship programming product, I'd be very surprised if they were planning on dropping it. After all, more people program in VB than any other language. Why would Microsoft turn their backs on their biggest customer base?
Got a link to back that up? VB support has already extended into
How about implementing international standards for collision avoidance similar to what exists in the marine world, e.g., If approaching head-on, both vector starboard, if approaching at right/oblique angles, the one to starboard descends (if altitude and terrain allows) and the one to port ascends. Seems simple to me.
Of course, the ideal solution is to stick to your flight plan when flying IFR, keeping your eyes open when flying VFR and when flying VFR stay within VFR conditions, keeping your eyes open all the while, and fly conservatively.
Perhaps it's different in the US, but in Canada, you should never be in a "head-on" collision situation while VFR (or IFR, for that matter). In Canada, VFR aircraft on eastbound headings (0 - 179 degrees magnetic) must fly at odd-thousands plus 500 feet altitudes. Aircraft flying westbound (180 - 359 degrees magnetic) fly at even-thousands plus 500. This assures a 1000 foot vertical separation between opposite-facing traffic. IFR traffic flies at even and odd thousands (without the "plus 500").
Is that not how it works in the US, too?
And most flights are probably done 95% on autopilot these days.
For certain, almost all commercial flights employ autopilot for at least some segments of the flight. But certainly nowhere near 95% of all flights use autopilot. Don't underestimate the number of GA (General Aviation, a.k.a. "Private Pilots") out there flying for kicks and convenience.
The solution's actually quite simple: you just don't tell them that there's no "real" pilot.
That's precisely why at some point during every flight when I have to travel, I run up and bang on the cockpit door, demanding that they open it so I can see the pilots.
The pilot was doing a low pass for an air show, gave the engines throttle, and the computer on the Airbus 320 decided "no".
According to the Wiki article you linked to, it doesn't specify that "the computer decided 'no'," but rather it indicates that Airbus released a service bulletin alerting of anomolous behaviour with the engines. It could easily have been mechanical. Furthermore, turbofan engines such as those used on jet airplanes do not spool up to full power instantaneously like internal combustion engines. They require a few seconds to smoothly get up to speed and begin producing thrust.
The pilot should ALWAYS be free to override systems, and you should have a really, really, really REALLY good reason for putting any logic into control systems.
The pilots of American Airlines Flight 587 might disagree with you, if they'd survived the crash. The pilots commanded an excessive degree of rudder input while experiencing wake turbulence, which overstressed the airframe and caused a portion of the tail section to break free. If the computers had been allowed to override the pilots' input, it may have prevented the overstressing of the airframe, and while the passengers may have been tossed around a little bit more, the rudder would not have broken off, and the plane could have escaped the turbulence.
there is a BIG red button on the control yolk that
They're not flying an egg. It's a "yoke."
We also have a huge, peer-reviewed system for continuously training pilots in all aspects of flying; pilot's associations, company training and bulletins on safety, procedures, etc in most airlines, and word of mouth.
I assume you're referring to professional, commercial carrier pilots. There certainly is no such "continuous training program" for private pilots. Only some lax currency requirements.
My wife and I almost never watch live TV. Virtually everything we watch is pre-recorded (the exception being the odd hockey game). When we watch the shows we've recorded, we never watch the commercials. We fast foward through them all, as quickly as possible. I don't care if they're funny or amusing; they're still trying to sell me something. I just want to get back to my show.
We notice an amusing side-effect of this whenever we go out to the movies (once every 3 months or so), because we don't recognize any of the posters for upcoming movies! Virtually all the previews we see in the theater are brand new to us. The only reason we know about new movies at all is by media buzz ('Da Vinci Code,' 'Brokeback Mountain', or word of mouth from friends ("Did you know they're making another X-Men sequel?"). It's kind of funny, and the first time we noticed it, it really reminded us of how dramatically our viewing habits have changed thanks to the PVR.
The two cameras are at a security gate leading into the Pentagon. They're intended to capture images of cars and drivers passing through the checkpoint. For example, at one point in the video, a police car passes through the gate. The video very clearly captures this.
It's not intended to capture anything far away. Just who/what passes through that particular checkpoint.
And yet, no plane debris outside.
Actually, there was lots of plane debris outside. How weak is your conspiracy theory when you have to blatantly lie?
The fundermental problem is that no such steel framed building has ever totally collapsed due to fire in over a century, except on that one day.
... do you think maybe the nearby collapse of two massive skyscrapers might cause enough of an "earthquake" effect to weaken a building, such that subsequent debris damage and fire might cause it to collapse?
This is a fact that has greatly troubled architects and engineers since 9/11. The collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 invalidated many assumptions that had been used in building construction. Building designers have used to the lessons 9/11 to improve future building construction.
That said, the buildings probably would have stood up to the heat of the fire if the insulating foam on the steel skeleton had been maintained, and not allowed to flake off over the years, leaving the trusses vulnerable to fire and intense heat.
Even though there have been fires in such buildings before and since, including one in the 1970's in one of the WTC towers.
The fires the buildings were designed to withstand (and, as you point out, had withstood in the past) were not nearly as intense. A fire in a building like that was expected to be started by a careless cigarette butt (it was the 70's, after all) or an electrical short, or a grease fire in the kitchen. Whatever the case, the fire's fuel was expected to be limited to the furniture and carpet already in the building, thus limiting the potential intensity of the fire.
They never expected to need to stand up to a fire fueled by thousands and thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
WTC7 wasn't even hit by a plane, there is even reason to doubt that the impact damage to WTC1 and WTC2 was sufficent to greatly greatly weaken the structure.
You know what else is scary? I've seen video of buildings collapsing when they weren't on fire at all! I think something called an "earthquake" shook the ground a teeny tiny bit, and the buildings just fell down all on their own!
Hey... wait a minute
Naaaaaah.
Certainly once you *get* the plane close to the ground, it might be easy. But certainly not a simple task to bring a what, massive plane like a 757 (were not talking a Cessna here) down to the ground. "Ease it to the ground", key word is "ease".
Easing a plane into a smooth descent is trivial. With the plane trimmed for straight and level flight (which it already would have been once they'd taken over), you simply retard the throttles. The plane will maintain the same airspeed, and begin a descent. The speed of the descent is controlled merely by advancing or retarding the throttles.
Elsewhere I've read that these "rookie" pilots were able to maneuver these planes in some fantastically tight turns - beginners luck?
No, merely a complete disregard for the intended performance envelope of the aircraft. Pilots need to keep the various flight parameters (angle of attack, bank, airspeed, G-loading) within certain parameters. If you exceed them, then the plane must be taken out of service and thoroughly inspected before being certified as airworthy again. The hijackers didn't care about this, so they simply exceeded the intended limitations, producing turns and speeds not normally seen in aircraft of that size. Thus, the result looked "extraordinary," because it was not safe, and never seen before.
how did WTC 7, and the others, neatly collapse
You felt they should have tipped over? Do you have any idea how much the upper portion of the towers must have weighed? Without any sideways torquing force, how would the tower have begun leaning enough to "tip over," as everyone appears to have expected it to do? The only force acting on the tower was gravity (OK, maybe a little bit of wind). Gravity pulling straight down on several hundred thousand tons of steel and concrete... where would you expect it to go, other than straight down?
And WTC7 crashed because of?
Fire and poor maintenance.
WTC7 was constructed using the same materials and methodologies as the other towers. Conventional engineering wisdom indicated that such "foam insulated steel trusses" would stand up to fire. This "wisdom" had never actually been tested on a full-scale, and unfortunately, it turned out to be wrong.
The steel truss supports within the structure of the buildings was coated with a hardened fire-proof foam designed to protect the crucial skeletal structure in the event of a fire. However, given the age of the buildings, the foam protection had been drying out and flaking off for several years. Maintenance had been lax, and the foam had not been replaced. Thus, when the fires broke out, the steel framing did not have the benefit of its insulation, and it could not hold up to the heat of the fire. The steel weakened and collapsed.
As I said, these design techniques had never been tested on a full-scale. They'd simply been assumed to work. Large-scale building designers learned a great deal from the results of 9/11, and you can rest assured that newer building construction takes the lessons into account. Many other buildings in NY had been built using similar designs, and they've since had their foam insulation thoroughly inspected and replaced, where necessary.
You can't put the conspiracy theories to rest. They already believe you're covering something up. [...]The conspiracy theorists will just claim you've fabricated or altered the "new" evidence.
Sounds a lot like how religion deals with evidence supporting evolution.
Just a second. I know the Java sources have been available for a long time in src.zip. I've consulted it many-a-time. But what about the native code? You know, the actual runtime itself, and all the C code that goes behind all those "native" methods in the Java runtime? Is that code available now too? That's the code you'd really need access to in order to port the JRE to a new platform.
Swing is a joke. It doesn't look native, it is a resource hog
1995 called. They want your complaints back.
You know, back when Java first debuted, its critics complained that it ran too slow. This was back when everyone was running 486 DX/100's, and Pentium 75's were just coming onto the market. Advocates of Java countered that hardware would soon be fast enough to render Java's slight speed disadvantage (due to being interpreted code) irrelevant. Plus, a JIT compiler was in the works to make Java run just as fast as native code.
Guess what? They were right. We're not running 100 MHz machines anymore. We're running 2.4 GHz machines, and Java is just as quick and responsive as any other app. Today's machines have way more than enough CPU power and memory capacity to run even the largest Java apps with no delays at all.
Time for you to come up with some new, fresh complaints.
I don't think I would need to study for this competition, in college I never studied for a computer science exam.
Nor an English exam, apparently.
It was my theory that if I couldn't deduce the problem on the fly, then I shouldn't be coding at all.
Deducing problems is easy. Deducing the solutions, however, is much harder. And believing you can do it without the benefit of the pioneers that came before you is arrogant and closed-minded. It's not about "memorizing" the work of Knuth, Tanenbaum, Stroustrup, etc., but rather learning why their solutions work. I didn't "memorize" that 2^5=32. It just does. I understand it.
Coding isn't about regurgitation or memorization, it's about how you instinctively attack a problem.
And university is about learning the best practices and tactics that have been discovered and published by those who came before you, and learning how to apply those techniques to problem-solve. Its not about "instinctively" attacking a problem, but rather using the research and study that came before you to improve those instincts. Widening your horizon. Expanding your toolbox.
Certain courses can't make you memorize stuff to be a better coder but they can give you a bag of tricks or arsenol with which to attack problems.
Yes, and those are the things you should be studying. But you claimed you never studied for a computer science exam. Now you're contradicting yourself, but you still sound arrogant.
Why waste concentration on memorization when you have instant access to all your past work right at your fingertips?
Why limit yourself to only consulting your own past solutions when there are decades of well-documented research into innovative, ingenius, and non-intuitive solutions that smarter people (Kernigan, Ritchie, Knuth, Torvalds, Tanenbaum, etc.) have already figured out and written out for you to learn? I think that was the parent poster's point.
It's stupid to ignore the wealth of knowledge and experience already learned the hard way because you discard it as merely "memorizing." It's not. If you study the problem and learn why the solution works, you've just made yourself into a better coder. I didn't "memorize" how Huffman Encoding works. I learned why it works, and I probably wouldn't have figured it out on my own. But it's one of the tools I can use now, because I understand it. I learned it.
It's arrogant, ignorant, and shortsighted to believe you can just "teach yourself" and "figure out" perfect solutions to all the potential programming problems you'll encounter, while ignoring all the work done (and published) by the computer science and mathematical luminaries that preceded you.
That may be true, but they're also full of money, the thing that really counts in the court system.
Really? Is that why Dennis Kozlowski, Mark Swartz, Andrew Fastow, Michael Kopper, Bernie Ebbers, and Martha Stewart all got away with their crimes?
Oh, no wait, that's right. They were all found guilty, even though they are all extremely wealthy.
"Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one. ... and no one thinks their own stinks."
Why does hardly anyone ever include the other half of this quote?
I'm not sure if similar actions are widespread in the US yet, but up here, Canadian ISPs already discriminate based on content. Ports used by popuplar P2P software is throttled to the point where throughput is almost choked off completely. Many Rogers subscribers have found a way to "hack" their torrent bandwidth back to normal, at least temporarily, by using the same port Rogers is using for their new VOIP service.
Resistance seems futile, as no ISP wants their users using P2P apps. What can we do? We used to threaten to cancel our services with providers guilty of bandwidth throttling, but now they all do it, so what options are left, besides simply accepting that this is how the future of the Internet will be? Normal access to "preferred" sites that make the ISP money, and discouraged (throttled) access to sites and services that cost the ISP money. It sucks. I'm open to suggestions.
I am saying Americans are TOO HYGENIC. Or to elaborate:
- Washing yourself? Every day a shower.
Look, I know this is Slashdot, but you can't criticise people for not exercising, and say they shower too much. If you want them to exercise more, then trust me, one shower every 2 or 3 days is not going to cut it. I shower daily even if I haven't exercised on that day. Days on which I do exercise, I shower twice (the usual one in the morning to start the day, and again after exercising).
Heck, sometimes in the summer, I occassionally even shower 3 times in a single day (the morning shower, after an afternoon workout, and one more right before bed if it's hot and muggy).
Showering doesn't make a person unhealthy. It makes them less stinky.
The truth is, there are only two markets in the US that consistently see greater than inflation price increases: medicine and education.
Oil? Housing? Energy?
how it is that the USA can have a 60% obesity rate.
Small nit, but "obese" != "overweight." According to this table (admittedly out of date, but clearly shows the trend), 64.5% of Americans are "overweight." Only 30.5% are "obese." There's a difference.
Resturants, Fast Food, and the Lazy lifestyle of Americans (I know I am desperately trying to get my life rearranged to sanity right now) is the biggest problem.
Let me get this straight. Americans take far less time off than their European counterparts (10 days to their 28), and work a bunch of free overtime that's unheard of on the other side of the pond, and it's the Americans who are lazy? I don't follow.
Has it occurred to you that the reason American diets are suffering, and that people opt for the quick, cheap, convenient food that isn't as healthy might be precisely because they have much less personal time than their hard-working (with triple the vacation time) UK brethren?
All veggies are far better fresh.
I agree, but they're not always available. I don't know where you are geographically, but in my neck of the woods (Canada), it gets pretty hard to find "fresh" green peppers in February. I suppose you'll look down on me for settling for peppers that were picked pre-ripened in Mexico, then shipped to Canada, where I bought them 5 days later? How lazy of me to not grow my own peppers in the dead of winter!
I'm guessing you live someplace where it's toasty warm, year round?
Americans eat very little fish
As they should. Studies show that our waters are so contaminated with lead and mercury that you shouldn't eat fresh fish more than once per week.
Our food sucks because we are too damned lazy to learn how to cook right.
No, it's because we spend 9 hours at work, only get 10 vacation days a year, and would prefer to spend our free hours spending quality bonding time with our family than slaving over a stove making something "fresh."
Americans will not take 1 hour out of the mid-day to go to the farmers market to get fresh food,
1 hour! Are you nuts? We only get 30 minutes for lunch. Anything longer than that, and we have to stay late to make it up. And how "fresh" will those veggies be after sitting in my warm office all afternoon?
last I knew, the '555' exchange was reserved for special purposes, like information
In many area codes, it is. But not all. Go here and enter "555" in the "Prefix" field, then click "Search by Number." While there are indeed a few "DIRASST" entries in the City/Switch Name column, there are also a lot of legitimate locales which use the prefix for general phone numbers.