The ultimate functionality isn't a whole lot different, but the interface and intuitiveness have been improved. It took me a lot less time to create the structures I needed in Management Studio than it did in Enterprise. The tools for creating stored procedures seemed a lot nicer, in particular. I'd used the old Enterprise Manager for a web app I'd done a couple years ago (still use it for that server). I haven't had any glitches with Mangement Studio yet, but perhaps my database isn't of the same scope as yours. I'm using it to store large datasets for a scientific simulation, so the sim app is the usually the only connection being made to it (not hundreds of users). I've also started work on a large ASP.NET app that uses 2005 Standard, though, so maybe I'll run into any bugs under load. Of all the available options for my sim-app needs - a database to interface with a C# app that will be sold as a workstation - it made the most sense. I had been using Postgres, which wasn't a bad db at all, but the PGAdmin tool was buggy in comparison (table changes would only refresh at random intervals). The only real options for me were Postgres and... nothing until SQL Express. MySQL costs $200 per box to distribute commercially on workstations. Aside from the 4GB limit on individual database sizes, SQL Server Express is really a valuable gimme from someone like Microsoft. Maybe they're just giving away free crack to get people hooked, but I'll take advantage of it when useful.
The other problem with ASP.NET is that so much of the action is behind the curtain
Well, from what I gather, Ruby on Rails hides database access pretty thoroughly as well. WebDev systems exist for the purpose of that very concept... making standard operations into black boxes. I've been using the new SQL Express in a project over the last several months. It's quite nice for a free, distributable DB, and the Management Studio download has been much nicer than the old 2000 version (or the Postgres Admin tool I used before this). A book like this would have been handy, as there aren't a lot of comprehensive resources on the web for Express.
It took reading almost a hundred posts in this thread before I found one that made practical and salient points. Kudos! It's interesting how many climatologists apparently read Slashdot. I imagine that what happens for a topic such as this is a flurry of people searching the web for a predetermined argument to back up their ideology. This doesn't happen with stories about more discete, testable phenomenon, for the obvious reason that outcomes are knowable. It's cavalier to say that something could happen when there isn't a way to disprove your theory. Global warming (at least in the last 100 years) has been proven through measurements. That much is a matter of record. CO2 levels have also risen. These are the facts. From these facts, however, it isn't really possible to say with certainty what the climate will be like in 100 years, any more than it would be to predict that a crying baby will cry louder in 5 hours. Given it were certain that mean temperatures would continue to rise at their current rate, it also isn't possible to confidently say that the result would be uniformly "bad." It's more likely to be a mixture of good and bad. We simply haven't mastered the dynamics of such domains well enough to make such predictions accurately. On another point, though I can appreciate the desire to hedge one's bets and err on the side of caution, I don't see the economics of the situation working in favor of such behavior. Cheaper energy is an advantage in the global prisoner's dilemma of economics. People will continue to use fossil fuels until it becomes more costly than the alternatives. Hoping for any majority of humanity to do otherwise is more certain to fail than any climate prediction is certain of validation.
Not that any games should be excused for having bugs in them, but I don't think that this is a Microsoft issue. Aside from the whole fiasco of not removing the plastic seals on the heatsinks, the system is fine. What I suspect is that this is an inevitable cost of the increasing complexity of gaming code. Games of generations past didn't have physics engines or advanced AI or pixel shading routines or multithreaded designs. I predict that games for the PS3 will have just as many title bugs as games on the 360, and the next generation will have a few more, etc. The possible permutations of variable states in a next-gen game are just getting beyond the capacity of perfect beta testing.
You want to see waste? After all the smoke clears, and the last argument is piled on this bloated topic tree, I'm confident that no one will have changed their minds about the realities of this issue (or any of the tangential political arguments). People don't think objectively. We frame our understanding of things in coherence with our existing emotional associations. The depressive sees the negative in everything, the manic sees the pleasure, etc (aka, the glass is half full). Despite this, we all attempt to modify each other's vantage point with an intellectual exercise of "argumentation", which is only effective for topics where the arguments do not cause a conceptual conflict for the receiver. The only people likely to incorporate the argument are those who already accept the underlying premise, rendering the effort relatively ineffectual.
Despite not having a lot of money at the time, my dad found the resources to get a TRS-80 "COCO 2" computer when I was a kid. I poured over the little green BASIC programming book that came with the system, and wrote dozens of monolithic, procedural beasts, all of which were unretrieveable from my crappy tape backups. Still, it taught me the basics of "thinking computerese": variables, loops, conditionals, etc, that stuck with me over the years (and various bad habits that took a while to unlearn). Of the many educational domains that I've been exposed to, programming always made total sense to me, though somehow I've never managed to get too deep into mathematics. I fondly remember my dog-eared copy of the yearly Tandy computer catalog that I would drool over, dreaming of the "Extended BASIC" and 128K RAM options that cost several hunded dollars. Everything back then was at least $200, and usually more. Makes the outrageous price of new video cards seem less unprecedented. After the CoCo gave up the ghost, I went on to several flaky C64s, and then finally a 286 that I got at a garage sale for $3! (the owner thought it was broken). Who knows how many motherboard/CPUs I've been through since then.
To label the effects of a parasitic infection on an organ as mind control is an unnecessary distinction. It's simply one of many possible parasitic infections that alter the functioning of the the body. If what we're evaluating is altered behavior, a typical flu offers a more immediate demonstration. Typical flu vicitms will (for a time) become less active, communicate less, etc. I think that what intrigues many about this particular instance is the concept of invisible, "subconscious" control... that something we're not aware of may be nudging us into different thoughts and feelings. This, however, implies that there is some uncorruptable state of free will which one ideally operates within, which simply isn't established. Our thoughts and actions are in situ the result of numerous interactions not apparent to our conscious consideration. We're just along for the ride, parasite or no. Beyond this, if Toxoplasma gondii infection is indeed so prevelant, it's likely been a factor in the dynamics of human evolution, anyway. Our brains perhaps already assume the potential for such influence in their normal operation.
There are plenty of people in the United States who live in rural areas that aren't served by any mode of broadband, and it looks unlikely that this is going to change. Current boraodband requires either coaxial cable or a close location to a telephone exchange in order to get DSL. With many phone companies dropping the installation of land lines altogether, and rural TV viewers turning to dish-based television, it's also unlikely that cable companies will bother wiring up any small outlying areas. Aside from this, I imagine that game companies bristle at the idea of their software being pirated more easily over network delivery.
During my childhood/adolescence, I noticed that up until about 4rd or 5th grade, I "fit in" relatively well. My behavior wasn't grossly out of the norm, or at least not chastised. It wasn't until all of the other kids reached a certain level of self-awareness, and began adopting social personas, that I lost the ability to blend in with the group. Kids who had been my friends in the spring would return to school in the fall with an entirely new attitude, with new values and opinions, and would never relate to me in the same manner again. There's an episode of the Simpsons where Milhouse moves to Capital City and adopts a new persona which exemplifies this phenomena. It seemed obvious to me that although these newly minted adolescents acted and dressed differently, they weren't really different. They were doggedly acting out a role which they had observed in others; one which had somehow impressed them as the correct way to behave. It seemed very phony to me. Still, the years rolled on, and the adopted behaviors became more fluid and ingrained to the point that for all I knew, they'd always been that way. For some reason, this never really happened to me. I continued to like the same things I always had, think of myself the same way, etc. I never primped or postured or sought out typical rites of manly initiation. I just kind of got older and learned more. I observed and understood the norms around me, but they never became natural to me because I never seemed to take their adoption so seriously, and thus never practiced them so frequently. They seemed arbitrary and sometimes just stupid, so I rejected them. This resulted in me having fewer friends, which exposed me to fewer chances to learn these behaviors, resulting in a feedback loop of isolation. Anyway, my point is that perhaps social skills aren't an innate ability which some have and others lack, but something that people have to actively learn and culture. It's a matter of reward and attention. If I find inner pursuits more rewarding than social pursuits, I practice my social skills less and instead read about topics that interest me. In doing so, I come to learn more than other people about the topics I appreciate, but mainly because I've spent so much more time developing that skill. Social skills still strike me as arbitrary and phony to a degree, but perhaps that's just what they are - the human interface equivalent of XML. It serves a purpose of identifying and ordering people in the hierarchy of social strata, and doesn't have to make specific sense or take a given form.
I've never been impressed with Baren-Cohen's ideas about autism. To say that autists are "systemizers" is about as utilitarian as saying that artists are "feelers." Beyond that, it's a simplification to label a broad range of behavior as all being "autism," much like labeling all disconnected thinking as schizophrenia. The brain is an incredibly arcane system of systems, all interconnected through myriad feedback loops and spurious environmental inputs. The spectrum of behavior that results has a broad range of overlap, and its interpretation is very subjective. People read articles like this and walk away with the idea that "nerds" are autistic, and that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and "social skills". Perhaps there is an association, but who's to say that people who don't perform as expected in a conversation aren't more accurately constrained by ADD or dyslexia or subclinical epilepsy or a dozen other syndromes that affect the ability to maintain and mirror appropriate social responses? You find what you're looking for, and assuming that these tidy relationships describe broad traits will assuredly result in identifying those traits in people, like someone seeing "his father's eyes" in the baby of a cuckold son. Science works best when the topic uder review posseses discrete qualities, which can be measured and compared on a uniform basis. Presently, there are few such methods for studying behavior. Perhaps in the future better brain imaging scans, neurotransmitter assays, and more unbiased, involuntary behavioral tests will ferret out usable associations and predictions about brain disorders.
I'm getting kind of bummed about the meager gains we're seeing in recent years with CPU speed. Sure, we're going to multi-core, but there's only so much a programmer can do to wring performance gains out of threading without making things too complex and unmanageable. I want to know when the next real quantum leap is coming, like optical processors or quantum computing... something that gives us an order of magntitude increase instead of another 8%. Looking at Intel's timeline for the next 10 years isn't encouraging. A lot of fuzzy ideas about the Internet, "user experience", and parallelism. I wonder where we'll be performance wise in 30 years, in comparison to the difference between now and 1976.
It amuses me to see the contortions that people go through in ascribing their behavior to the freely chosen action of a "rational" entity. Of course we can't easily give up habits... we're not in control. Our brains are continually keeping a scoresheet as to which experiences and responses triggered or are associated with it's primary objectives: survival and reproduction. In this light, habits can only be changed when a stronger association is made (you quit smoking because something associates it strongly enough with your experiences of death or loss). A study like this will come along, and people will add it to the list of things the brain does on autopilot, but still believe that it is only "coloring" their behavior, when it in fact is their behavior. This study highlights the fact that when a situation or stimuli isn't novel, the brain works from its catalog of experience. Conciousness seems to serve mainly as a gateway to organizing new experiences. It's a mental room where we experience the process of our operators making connections between the stream of incoming stimuli and the database of stored associations for those stimuli. As the associations are made, it forms a "thought" or story about the stimuli, framing it in perspective to the past and in anticipation of an expected outcome in the future. It's a continual retelling of the story of our experiences. This is much like our dreams, though they are formed of freer associations in the absence of stimuli. There are plenty of books on this topic.
"We propose that this condition is not precipitated by an agitated state of humors, but by tiny microbes". The stress model of disease has always been a bit too subjective and artificial for me. Stress is still generically cited as being responsible for heart disease and depression. It's not even so much that stress is blamed, but the assumed endpoint of a personal reaction. Stress is supposedly something we can control... a reaction to the events of our day. Treating as it presently is, it's almost like a supernatural power. Stress may be associated with events and feelings, but it's also a cascade of chemical messengers that are amenable to study. Why not dig deeper into what reactions and dynamics the release of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine induce? There is a medical prejudice against things brain related. If diabetes was primarily associated with a mood disorder, would it have been researched as well? I guess the special case argument for the ignorance of microbes in ulcers has to do with the assumption that bacteria don't grow well in the environment of the stomach, but still. Any identifiable condition that is currently written off as an intangible artifact of one's personality type seems ripe for rediscovery, and there are still plenty, especially in gastroenterology and physchiatry. It's no surprise to me that this discovery was in the GI field. It's this lack of basic research that keeps open a market for herbalists, homeopaths, and their ilk.
I used to have one of those as well (mine was a model 60). Those things were tanks! I seriously could've hid safely behind it in the event of gunfire. IBM didn't spare on the steel. They were glacier slow, though (286 with 1MB RAM). The memory cards were huge, and had those crazy tin modules on them.
I'm working on a simulator that involves large amounts of data, and originally started work with MySQL. It's so popular that I assumed it was the easiest to use. Since our product is sold as a workstation, I quickly realized that each unit would cost us $200 for the MySQL server. A quick search uncovered PostGres, which has really turned out to be just as easy to use, is free, and even has a.NET interface and simple administrative utility. Pretty nice. I don't know if it's slower than MySQL, but it's plenty fast for me. You can even do transaction processing. It's strange that even though PostGres is so old, there are almost no books available for it (aside from the Douglas text), while MySQL has dozens.
Good lord, it's so over the top. It's tragic, humorous, and fascinating all at once. I would never have guessed that people were spending their weekends blowing up prairie dogs to hard rock guitar.
If a given area of sense is rewired to respond to different stimuli, does this obscure or deform the original utility of that sense? If I use, say, pressure on my scalp to map things spatially, what happens if someone strokes my head? Do I experience an object presence?
I'm always surprised by scientists who take a few meager studies and fill in the huge gaps to come up with such generalizations. This study hasn't proven anything other than their interpretations of what constitutes a profession or field. Beyond this, the differences between finger length ratios cited in the full paper is very small, and close to the likely margin of error for their measurement standards. What constitutes the beginning of the finger for their measurements? The webbing? The bone underneath? It's inexact. There is also variation from hand to hand in individuals (i.e. asymmetry). I smell unconscious bias.
Apples and Oranges
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As other posters have said, I don't think that C# is meant for big enterprise apps, but littler 'toy' apps. Still, you'd be surprised how many of such apps are in use right now. The biggest strengths of C# are:
1)Simplicity. Everyone loves to argue about how purists should code things, but in the real world, a lot of code is written by people who are blissfully ignorant of theory. VS allows them to make obvious progress, reusability be damned. A crude, but working app is more impressive to a clueless manager than a collection of nascent classes. 2)Integration. This goes along with #1. Much of the heavy lifting in creating desktop apps is rolled into.NET, so that a user can program to a higher level library. Documentation is all there. It also provides all of the tools and files needed in one tidy install, without the need for combining different packages. It all comes from one vendor, and it's easy to get your mind around. 3)ASP.NET. I would argue that ASP.NET is the easiest way to accomplish application-like behavior in a web site. Session state works well, database access is a couple lines of code, and you can even draw the page on a coordinate system if HTML stymies you. Scorn it if you must, but it's a good step toward standardizing web/application development.
Doh! I thought that the area of a square was the very definition of logorithmic (sides increase as the sqrt of the area). So what's the proper descriptor for the falloff in gravitational force with increasing distance? I've probably been saying that wrong for years as well.
It's not actually a full size book, but a short story. I remember reading it in 6th grade as part of a "special" reading program my school had entered me in. It was a pretty disturbing story to read when I was 11 years old, what with small town residents gleefully stoning a girl to death in superstitious hopes of improving their fortunes. I also remember thinking that Shirley Jackson was one of the cuter authors pictured in the book of short stories.
I think that a lot of consumers think that there will be a signifigant difference in the rectangular dimensions of an 8MP image versus a 5MP. They don't consider that as the area expands, exponentially more pixels are needed to gain, say, another inch in height and width (i.e. the pixel count increases as the square of the dimensions), so that a 5MP image would represent an image side of 2236.1 pixels, while an 8MP image has 2828.4 pixel sides, a ~26% pixel increase per side from 5MP, where the user was thinking of a straight ratio (60%) increase.
Everyone just takes for granted that the current University system of education is the only way to enhance the job skills of the population. It seems to me, however, that for the cost involved, the rewards/results are increasingly at odds with this idea. The current system is geared for the demands of academics, and the upper class of the past. It's overly generalized, out of date, lengthy, and plain inefficient. Students are increasingly needing graduate degrees to make up for the diluted education they recieved as undergrads. Still, no one seems to complain. It's just taken as a fact of life that the only way to gain proficiency in a given field is via bachelors>masters>PhD. I propose change in two areas: 1)Roll the cost of education into Federal taxes (and health care for that matter) so that everyone has truly equal access at all levels (no exclusive property tax districts). 2)Evaluate the market to identify the skills needed for global competition, and focus secondary education on these areas, per job discipline.
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate functionality isn't a whole lot different, but the interface and intuitiveness have been improved. It took me a lot less time to create the structures I needed in Management Studio than it did in Enterprise. The tools for creating stored procedures seemed a lot nicer, in particular. I'd used the old Enterprise Manager for a web app I'd done a couple years ago (still use it for that server). I haven't had any glitches with Mangement Studio yet, but perhaps my database isn't of the same scope as yours. I'm using it to store large datasets for a scientific simulation, so the sim app is the usually the only connection being made to it (not hundreds of users). I've also started work on a large ASP.NET app that uses 2005 Standard, though, so maybe I'll run into any bugs under load.
Of all the available options for my sim-app needs - a database to interface with a C# app that will be sold as a workstation - it made the most sense. I had been using Postgres, which wasn't a bad db at all, but the PGAdmin tool was buggy in comparison (table changes would only refresh at random intervals). The only real options for me were Postgres and... nothing until SQL Express. MySQL costs $200 per box to distribute commercially on workstations. Aside from the 4GB limit on individual database sizes, SQL Server Express is really a valuable gimme from someone like Microsoft. Maybe they're just giving away free crack to get people hooked, but I'll take advantage of it when useful.
The other problem with ASP .NET is that so much of the action is behind the curtain
Well, from what I gather, Ruby on Rails hides database access pretty thoroughly as well. WebDev systems exist for the purpose of that very concept... making standard operations into black boxes.
I've been using the new SQL Express in a project over the last several months. It's quite nice for a free, distributable DB, and the Management Studio download has been much nicer than the old 2000 version (or the Postgres Admin tool I used before this). A book like this would have been handy, as there aren't a lot of comprehensive resources on the web for Express.
I feel a 400 post platform diatribe coming up...
It took reading almost a hundred posts in this thread before I found one that made practical and salient points. Kudos!
It's interesting how many climatologists apparently read Slashdot. I imagine that what happens for a topic such as this is a flurry of people searching the web for a predetermined argument to back up their ideology. This doesn't happen with stories about more discete, testable phenomenon, for the obvious reason that outcomes are knowable. It's cavalier to say that something could happen when there isn't a way to disprove your theory. Global warming (at least in the last 100 years) has been proven through measurements. That much is a matter of record. CO2 levels have also risen. These are the facts. From these facts, however, it isn't really possible to say with certainty what the climate will be like in 100 years, any more than it would be to predict that a crying baby will cry louder in 5 hours. Given it were certain that mean temperatures would continue to rise at their current rate, it also isn't possible to confidently say that the result would be uniformly "bad." It's more likely to be a mixture of good and bad. We simply haven't mastered the dynamics of such domains well enough to make such predictions accurately.
On another point, though I can appreciate the desire to hedge one's bets and err on the side of caution, I don't see the economics of the situation working in favor of such behavior. Cheaper energy is an advantage in the global prisoner's dilemma of economics. People will continue to use fossil fuels until it becomes more costly than the alternatives. Hoping for any majority of humanity to do otherwise is more certain to fail than any climate prediction is certain of validation.
Not that any games should be excused for having bugs in them, but I don't think that this is a Microsoft issue. Aside from the whole fiasco of not removing the plastic seals on the heatsinks, the system is fine. What I suspect is that this is an inevitable cost of the increasing complexity of gaming code. Games of generations past didn't have physics engines or advanced AI or pixel shading routines or multithreaded designs. I predict that games for the PS3 will have just as many title bugs as games on the 360, and the next generation will have a few more, etc. The possible permutations of variable states in a next-gen game are just getting beyond the capacity of perfect beta testing.
You want to see waste? After all the smoke clears, and the last argument is piled on this bloated topic tree, I'm confident that no one will have changed their minds about the realities of this issue (or any of the tangential political arguments). People don't think objectively. We frame our understanding of things in coherence with our existing emotional associations. The depressive sees the negative in everything, the manic sees the pleasure, etc (aka, the glass is half full). Despite this, we all attempt to modify each other's vantage point with an intellectual exercise of "argumentation", which is only effective for topics where the arguments do not cause a conceptual conflict for the receiver. The only people likely to incorporate the argument are those who already accept the underlying premise, rendering the effort relatively ineffectual.
Despite not having a lot of money at the time, my dad found the resources to get a TRS-80 "COCO 2" computer when I was a kid. I poured over the little green BASIC programming book that came with the system, and wrote dozens of monolithic, procedural beasts, all of which were unretrieveable from my crappy tape backups.
Still, it taught me the basics of "thinking computerese": variables, loops, conditionals, etc, that stuck with me over the years (and various bad habits that took a while to unlearn). Of the many educational domains that I've been exposed to, programming always made total sense to me, though somehow I've never managed to get too deep into mathematics.
I fondly remember my dog-eared copy of the yearly Tandy computer catalog that I would drool over, dreaming of the "Extended BASIC" and 128K RAM options that cost several hunded dollars. Everything back then was at least $200, and usually more. Makes the outrageous price of new video cards seem less unprecedented.
After the CoCo gave up the ghost, I went on to several flaky C64s, and then finally a 286 that I got at a garage sale for $3! (the owner thought it was broken). Who knows how many motherboard/CPUs I've been through since then.
To label the effects of a parasitic infection on an organ as mind control is an unnecessary distinction. It's simply one of many possible parasitic infections that alter the functioning of the the body. If what we're evaluating is altered behavior, a typical flu offers a more immediate demonstration. Typical flu vicitms will (for a time) become less active, communicate less, etc. I think that what intrigues many about this particular instance is the concept of invisible, "subconscious" control... that something we're not aware of may be nudging us into different thoughts and feelings. This, however, implies that there is some uncorruptable state of free will which one ideally operates within, which simply isn't established. Our thoughts and actions are in situ the result of numerous interactions not apparent to our conscious consideration. We're just along for the ride, parasite or no.
Beyond this, if Toxoplasma gondii infection is indeed so prevelant, it's likely been a factor in the dynamics of human evolution, anyway. Our brains perhaps already assume the potential for such influence in their normal operation.
There are plenty of people in the United States who live in rural areas that aren't served by any mode of broadband, and it looks unlikely that this is going to change. Current boraodband requires either coaxial cable or a close location to a telephone exchange in order to get DSL. With many phone companies dropping the installation of land lines altogether, and rural TV viewers turning to dish-based television, it's also unlikely that cable companies will bother wiring up any small outlying areas.
Aside from this, I imagine that game companies bristle at the idea of their software being pirated more easily over network delivery.
During my childhood/adolescence, I noticed that up until about 4rd or 5th grade, I "fit in" relatively well. My behavior wasn't grossly out of the norm, or at least not chastised. It wasn't until all of the other kids reached a certain level of self-awareness, and began adopting social personas, that I lost the ability to blend in with the group. Kids who had been my friends in the spring would return to school in the fall with an entirely new attitude, with new values and opinions, and would never relate to me in the same manner again. There's an episode of the Simpsons where Milhouse moves to Capital City and adopts a new persona which exemplifies this phenomena. It seemed obvious to me that although these newly minted adolescents acted and dressed differently, they weren't really different. They were doggedly acting out a role which they had observed in others; one which had somehow impressed them as the correct way to behave. It seemed very phony to me. Still, the years rolled on, and the adopted behaviors became more fluid and ingrained to the point that for all I knew, they'd always been that way. For some reason, this never really happened to me. I continued to like the same things I always had, think of myself the same way, etc. I never primped or postured or sought out typical rites of manly initiation. I just kind of got older and learned more. I observed and understood the norms around me, but they never became natural to me because I never seemed to take their adoption so seriously, and thus never practiced them so frequently. They seemed arbitrary and sometimes just stupid, so I rejected them. This resulted in me having fewer friends, which exposed me to fewer chances to learn these behaviors, resulting in a feedback loop of isolation.
Anyway, my point is that perhaps social skills aren't an innate ability which some have and others lack, but something that people have to actively learn and culture. It's a matter of reward and attention. If I find inner pursuits more rewarding than social pursuits, I practice my social skills less and instead read about topics that interest me. In doing so, I come to learn more than other people about the topics I appreciate, but mainly because I've spent so much more time developing that skill.
Social skills still strike me as arbitrary and phony to a degree, but perhaps that's just what they are - the human interface equivalent of XML. It serves a purpose of identifying and ordering people in the hierarchy of social strata, and doesn't have to make specific sense or take a given form.
I've never been impressed with Baren-Cohen's ideas about autism. To say that autists are "systemizers" is about as utilitarian as saying that artists are "feelers." Beyond that, it's a simplification to label a broad range of behavior as all being "autism," much like labeling all disconnected thinking as schizophrenia. The brain is an incredibly arcane system of systems, all interconnected through myriad feedback loops and spurious environmental inputs. The spectrum of behavior that results has a broad range of overlap, and its interpretation is very subjective.
People read articles like this and walk away with the idea that "nerds" are autistic, and that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and "social skills". Perhaps there is an association, but who's to say that people who don't perform as expected in a conversation aren't more accurately constrained by ADD or dyslexia or subclinical epilepsy or a dozen other syndromes that affect the ability to maintain and mirror appropriate social responses? You find what you're looking for, and assuming that these tidy relationships describe broad traits will assuredly result in identifying those traits in people, like someone seeing "his father's eyes" in the baby of a cuckold son.
Science works best when the topic uder review posseses discrete qualities, which can be measured and compared on a uniform basis. Presently, there are few such methods for studying behavior. Perhaps in the future better brain imaging scans, neurotransmitter assays, and more unbiased, involuntary behavioral tests will ferret out usable associations and predictions about brain disorders.
I'm getting kind of bummed about the meager gains we're seeing in recent years with CPU speed. Sure, we're going to multi-core, but there's only so much a programmer can do to wring performance gains out of threading without making things too complex and unmanageable. I want to know when the next real quantum leap is coming, like optical processors or quantum computing... something that gives us an order of magntitude increase instead of another 8%. Looking at Intel's timeline for the next 10 years isn't encouraging. A lot of fuzzy ideas about the Internet, "user experience", and parallelism. I wonder where we'll be performance wise in 30 years, in comparison to the difference between now and 1976.
It amuses me to see the contortions that people go through in ascribing their behavior to the freely chosen action of a "rational" entity. Of course we can't easily give up habits... we're not in control. Our brains are continually keeping a scoresheet as to which experiences and responses triggered or are associated with it's primary objectives: survival and reproduction. In this light, habits can only be changed when a stronger association is made (you quit smoking because something associates it strongly enough with your experiences of death or loss).
A study like this will come along, and people will add it to the list of things the brain does on autopilot, but still believe that it is only "coloring" their behavior, when it in fact is their behavior. This study highlights the fact that when a situation or stimuli isn't novel, the brain works from its catalog of experience. Conciousness seems to serve mainly as a gateway to organizing new experiences. It's a mental room where we experience the process of our operators making connections between the stream of incoming stimuli and the database of stored associations for those stimuli. As the associations are made, it forms a "thought" or story about the stimuli, framing it in perspective to the past and in anticipation of an expected outcome in the future. It's a continual retelling of the story of our experiences. This is much like our dreams, though they are formed of freer associations in the absence of stimuli.
There are plenty of books on this topic.
"We propose that this condition is not precipitated by an agitated state of humors, but by tiny microbes". The stress model of disease has always been a bit too subjective and artificial for me. Stress is still generically cited as being responsible for heart disease and depression. It's not even so much that stress is blamed, but the assumed endpoint of a personal reaction. Stress is supposedly something we can control... a reaction to the events of our day. Treating as it presently is, it's almost like a supernatural power. Stress may be associated with events and feelings, but it's also a cascade of chemical messengers that are amenable to study. Why not dig deeper into what reactions and dynamics the release of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine induce? There is a medical prejudice against things brain related. If diabetes was primarily associated with a mood disorder, would it have been researched as well? I guess the special case argument for the ignorance of microbes in ulcers has to do with the assumption that bacteria don't grow well in the environment of the stomach, but still. Any identifiable condition that is currently written off as an intangible artifact of one's personality type seems ripe for rediscovery, and there are still plenty, especially in gastroenterology and physchiatry. It's no surprise to me that this discovery was in the GI field. It's this lack of basic research that keeps open a market for herbalists, homeopaths, and their ilk.
I used to have one of those as well (mine was a model 60). Those things were tanks! I seriously could've hid safely behind it in the event of gunfire. IBM didn't spare on the steel. They were glacier slow, though (286 with 1MB RAM). The memory cards were huge, and had those crazy tin modules on them.
I'm thinking more of things like Novodex. I'll defer to your knowledge in the realm of databases.
Well, yeah. What's your point? I was just surpised to find that there was a .NET interface. A lot of commercial code libraries still don't.
I'm working on a simulator that involves large amounts of data, and originally started work with MySQL. It's so popular that I assumed it was the easiest to use. Since our product is sold as a workstation, I quickly realized that each unit would cost us $200 for the MySQL server. A quick search uncovered PostGres, which has really turned out to be just as easy to use, is free, and even has a .NET interface and simple administrative utility. Pretty nice. I don't know if it's slower than MySQL, but it's plenty fast for me. You can even do transaction processing. It's strange that even though PostGres is so old, there are almost no books available for it (aside from the Douglas text), while MySQL has dozens.
Good lord, it's so over the top. It's tragic, humorous, and fascinating all at once. I would never have guessed that people were spending their weekends blowing up prairie dogs to hard rock guitar.
If a given area of sense is rewired to respond to different stimuli, does this obscure or deform the original utility of that sense? If I use, say, pressure on my scalp to map things spatially, what happens if someone strokes my head? Do I experience an object presence?
I'm always surprised by scientists who take a few meager studies and fill in the huge gaps to come up with such generalizations. This study hasn't proven anything other than their interpretations of what constitutes a profession or field. Beyond this, the differences between finger length ratios cited in the full paper is very small, and close to the likely margin of error for their measurement standards. What constitutes the beginning of the finger for their measurements? The webbing? The bone underneath? It's inexact. There is also variation from hand to hand in individuals (i.e. asymmetry). I smell unconscious bias.
As other posters have said, I don't think that C# is meant for big enterprise apps, but littler 'toy' apps. Still, you'd be surprised how many of such apps are in use right now. The biggest strengths of C# are:
.NET, so that a user can program to a higher level library. Documentation is all there. It also provides all of the tools and files needed in one tidy install, without the need for combining different packages. It all comes from one vendor, and it's easy to get your mind around.
1)Simplicity. Everyone loves to argue about how purists should code things, but in the real world, a lot of code is written by people who are blissfully ignorant of theory. VS allows them to make obvious progress, reusability be damned. A crude, but working app is more impressive to a clueless manager than a collection of nascent classes.
2)Integration. This goes along with #1. Much of the heavy lifting in creating desktop apps is rolled into
3)ASP.NET. I would argue that ASP.NET is the easiest way to accomplish application-like behavior in a web site. Session state works well, database access is a couple lines of code, and you can even draw the page on a coordinate system if HTML stymies you. Scorn it if you must, but it's a good step toward standardizing web/application development.
Doh! I thought that the area of a square was the very definition of logorithmic (sides increase as the sqrt of the area). So what's the proper descriptor for the falloff in gravitational force with increasing distance? I've probably been saying that wrong for years as well.
It's not actually a full size book, but a short story. I remember reading it in 6th grade as part of a "special" reading program my school had entered me in. It was a pretty disturbing story to read when I was 11 years old, what with small town residents gleefully stoning a girl to death in superstitious hopes of improving their fortunes. I also remember thinking that Shirley Jackson was one of the cuter authors pictured in the book of short stories.
I think that a lot of consumers think that there will be a signifigant difference in the rectangular dimensions of an 8MP image versus a 5MP. They don't consider that as the area expands, exponentially more pixels are needed to gain, say, another inch in height and width (i.e. the pixel count increases as the square of the dimensions), so that a 5MP image would represent an image side of 2236.1 pixels, while an 8MP image has 2828.4 pixel sides, a ~26% pixel increase per side from 5MP, where the user was thinking of a straight ratio (60%) increase.
Everyone just takes for granted that the current University system of education is the only way to enhance the job skills of the population. It seems to me, however, that for the cost involved, the rewards/results are increasingly at odds with this idea. The current system is geared for the demands of academics, and the upper class of the past. It's overly generalized, out of date, lengthy, and plain inefficient. Students are increasingly needing graduate degrees to make up for the diluted education they recieved as undergrads. Still, no one seems to complain. It's just taken as a fact of life that the only way to gain proficiency in a given field is via bachelors>masters>PhD. I propose change in two areas:
1)Roll the cost of education into Federal taxes (and health care for that matter) so that everyone has truly equal access at all levels (no exclusive property tax districts).
2)Evaluate the market to identify the skills needed for global competition, and focus secondary education on these areas, per job discipline.
Am I crazy?