It doesn't really matter. I was responding to a statement that said that if something receives signals and fires thrusters, then it must be a computer. Any definition that broad would be indistinguishable from "circuit" and would make the word "computer" redundant. I hate it when language evolves to a point where it's hard to express thoughts accurately.

This is the same problem I have with people accepting the phrase "I could care less" as meaning "I don't care". It makes language much harder to use. Imagine trying to explain the meaning of that phrase to someone learning English, they would come away thinking that each collection of words has some fungible meaning that is totally separate from the meanings of the individual word and the rules or grammar.

A collection of discreet electronic components hardly qualifies as a computer. Receiving radio signals was something done long before the first computer was invented.

Which leads to the summary's statement of "They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix." Visual Studio runs the servers and opens ports for you based on what type of program the project says it is.

One of my rules at work is: "If I check it out in Visual Studio and press 'Start', it better compile and run". It's not acceptable to make the next guy figure out how to run a program. Everyone I work with thinks I'm overreacting at first, but when they go to fix an issue in four-year-old code they've never seen before, they suddenly get it. Bonus points for starting the test suite by default instead of the actual program.

On my former Dodge, you popped the button off and stuck the key in the recess. The key is inductively powered by the car in this mode. On my current Mazda, you walk.

... then you push the button twice without your foot on the brake. It goes to run mode just like the second detent of a traditional key. Pressing once goes to accessory mode. More presses simply cycles between accessory...run...off.

But that's only because Intel let the marketing department make engineering decisions and kept making chips with higher and higher clock frequency. As soon as they regained their sanity, they once again dominated the benchmarks.

I do love how AMD brilliantly capitalized on the blunder. By labeling their chips according to the clock speed of the performance equivalent Intel chip - every time Intel put insane engineering effort into ratcheting the clock up 10% and only getting 1% better performance, AMD simply made their chips a tiny bit faster and labelled theirs the same as Intel's.

It's not win-win. If you lease a $50K car, pay 25K over three years and buy out for $25K (with a three year term), you are essentially getting a six year loan, but paying extra lease acquisition fees up front. If you don't buy out, then you lose by paying disposal fees (or the manufacturer uses that as a lever to get you into one of their cars next, reducing your ability to make the best deal). The only cases where you win are if it has some tax advantage for you, or if the market changes and the residual is way higher than you could ever get without the contract.

Also, the process only works if the water is frozen. That takes about 120 Watt-hours per liter of water. If the entire bottled water industry were converted to this process, that's about 3.6 billion kilowatt-hours used to produce bottles, or about 5% of the total world electricity usage.

I'd say this process needs some improvement before it will make the world a better place.

I once read that a third of all tax credit dollars earmarked for the poor go to H&R Block. This must be where another third goes. This is no different from the record companies fighting tooth and nail to prevent their old business model from dying. It's no surprise that it's happening - it's sad that it's working.

Almost all marketplaces are broken. Getting eyes on your website, users to download your app, people to watch your commercial, etc. are all not meritocracies. That's why there are whole categories of professions to handle them (advertising, SEO, etc.). Everyone that makes products knows that if you want to make a ton of money, don't put your money into making a better product, put your money into advertising your currently crappy product.

I got ripped apart a few days ago for making the comment that programming is currently at the equivalent maturity to medicine back in the blood-letting days. This is more proof that we haven't created adequate solutions for common problems like search yet. Sure Google was better than everyone before them and there has been a lot of advancement, but we have a very long way to go yet.

That's why software developers shouldn't insist on using the title Engineer. This kind of accountability is expected of an engineer, it's not an anomaly. When programming matures to the point where bugs are rare, then we will deserve the title.

I write software for a living and I'm well aware that if we were to compare computer science to medical science, the current era is roughly equivalent to the blood letting and leeches era. I can't wait for our penicillin to come around.

I don't see devs being hurt by this at all. Sure, Microsoft has changed what it is pushing, but their support of deprecated technology is still excellent. Not only is WCF still supported, but their SOAP stuff still continues to work just fine (and to be fully supported by Visual Studio), even though it hasn't been pushed for over ten years.

As for Silverlight - anyone that thought that was going to work wasn't paying attention. The fact is, there are still two markets for Windows apps; corporate stuff that has no reason to adopt Metro, so will continue to be WinForms and WPF for a long time; and consumer stuff, which is served well by apps delivered through app stores. In order to execute the current app store model without creating a virus epidemic, some protections need to be in place. That was always going to be based on the protections already in place with existing web technologies. Anyone who's surprised that app store apps adopted HTML5 and Javascript wasn't paying attention.

Also, the other technology supported for app store apps is XAML with a limited subset of the API. That's essentially what Silverlight was without the stupid browser plugin concept. So, Silverlight developers weren't left in the cold - 95% of their skillset is still useful for app store development.

No.

Matter and antimatter both spontaneously come from energy. We've seen it happen in supercollider experiments. Current big bang physics posits that all matter spontaneously formed from nothing but energy in processes known as leptogenesis and baryogenesis. The big mystery is that according to the physics we've observed, the matter and antimatter should have mostly turned back into energy. However, none of our experiments come close to the energy levels of leptogenesis and baryogenesis, so nothing has been disproven yet.

On the other hand, the universe coming into being with matter already in it, or matter somehow being moved into it, both would be huge deviations from the current scientific thinking. More importantly, we have a pretty good explanation for how things are without resorting to external forces, there are just a few gaps to fill (like the one that is the topic of this thread). There's no good reason to open the Pandora's Box of outside interference, as it makes meaningful discussion almost impossible.

If we stick to the current research path of assuming the universe is a closed system - we'll eventually find out if it's true or not. But, if we start with an assumption that the universe isn't a closed system, then it becomes impossible to get answers to the hard questions. Any question where there isn't an answer readily available (like "Why is there matter and not antimatter")" will simply be dismissed with "It was there all along" and no one will really learn anything.