Sure. The study isn't complete though. He's planning to gather data for all of next semester. Hopefully by then he'll have enough to draw meaningful conclusions.

Mike just posted a mirror of his post on another server. Hopefully this will hold up better under load.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~mihansen/modeling-programmers.html

These are just two participant's answers. Each program in the test has several variants, and each participant gets one variant at random. The goal is to get enough people to gather meaningful statistics. This will include having both novices and experts doing each of the variants in the videos posted here.

The experiment is testing several things. The primary thing is to see if different ways of writing a program lead to quantifiable differences in how programmers understand the code. This is why the novice saw a version with the functions inlined while I saw the version with function calls. The system just gives each person one of several variants for each program at random.

A secondary effect is to measure how novice and experienced programmers differ. This relies on having plenty of people so that you end up with some novices and some experienced people seeing each variant of each program. I don't think Mike had a video of a novice with the same variant I had, so he posted a different variant instead. I agree it doesn't make a fair comparison possible, but it's still interesting.

With as fast as Android phones are improving, this doesn't seem like a realistic concern for me. I have one of the original myTouch 3G's, which just recently got the Android 2.2 update. The thing is, the hardware really can't run the OS at a reasonable speed anymore. I'm now looking at getting a new phone simply so I can use the software to its fullest.

I don't think 20 years is that long to wait to write something down. Is it uncommon to wait 20 years before writing one's autobiography? We don't usually think people have forgotten all the details or are fabricating stories of their own life, even if they are telling things that happened 20 years ago.

If you look through 1 Thessalonians (the book the link you cited lists as being the first book in the New Testament), it mentions Christians in a fairly large area. There's already an established community of Christians. This book isn't establishing a new religion, it's encouraging people who are Christians already. Given how important the resurrection is to Christianity, I don't think the Christians of the time would have bought it had Paul suddenly said "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you these last 20 years, not only did Jesus die for us, He came back to life too!"

Most of the early teaching of Christianity was oral. If you notice, Paul wrote many of his epistles while he was in prison. It may be that they early Christians were too busy travelling around preaching to take the time to write down a complete account. Maybe as they decided to settle down, they also decided to write a more permanent record of the things they had been teaching most of their lives.

The Bible being infallible doesn't mean it is an unabridged compilation of all that is knowable. It simply means it is accurate on the subjects it addresses. The Bible primarily with things such as why are we here and how are we to treat each other. Apparently the existence or non-existence of aliens is not important to those questions. If we ever do discover aliens, it would be reasonable for Christians to conclude that God created them too, but their existence isn't something we need to know about to please God.

True faith is based on evidence, not opposed to evidence. If you look at the teachings of the apostles in Acts, for example, their message rested on the fact that there was a man who everyone had seen or heard of, who had done impressive miracles that many people have seen, was put to death in a very public fashion and then seen by many people alive afterwards. Surely, if these things were true, the faith that results from believing them would be one based on evidence and not warm feelings, right? Today our evidence primarily deals with the question of whether these accounts have been reliably preserved and recorded by credible witnesses. You may not find this evidence compelling, but I hope you can at least admit that there are Christians today who have come to their faith for better reasons than because their preacher said so.

I'm curious what you mean by this. Many of the letters in the New Testament are written to churches, and it seems that these must have been started or instituted in some way. The Bible even talks about some church organization, with bishops/pastors/elders (the terms are used interchangeably in the Bible) overseeing the spiritual needs of each church and deacons acting as servants of the church. Of course, I'd agree that any organization beyond this goes against what's in the Bible. The Bible definitely goes against building elaborate, word-wide hierarchies, adding to or changing (including ignoring) teachings of the Bible, and a lot of practices that are common in so many churches today.

I apologize if you knew all this already, you certainly do seem knowledgeable. I just wanted to clarify what point you were making.

I assume you have some lab computers that are already part of a network, can't you just install wireshark on them and use the existing network? You won't be able to teach everything, but you can probably cover a lot of it that way. Learning tends to be easier for me when I'm looking at the actual thing anyway. If you trust them with root access (or have automatic restores) they can experiment with different configurations too.

One guy I used to work with that used to work in supercomputing claimed he did one project involving aerodynamic simulations of Pringles chips. Apparently they were originally shaped like wings, and would become airborne when traveling along high speed conveyor belts. They used a simulation to find a shape that wouldn't generate so much lift.

I and most Christians I know do not have a problem with condoms, and we probably wouldn't even recommend prayer as the most effective way to prevent HIV. What we'd probably recommend instead is to only have sex with the person you're married to. Sure, this doesn't work too well against rape and blood transfusions, but then again, condoms don't really work there either.

(warning, shameless plug)

I've been working on a similar program for a while called libgis. The main difference is that libgis is built as a library instead of an application and uses OpenGL for rendering, which allows it to render terrain. It also uses GTK+ instead of Qt, but that's just due to my personal preferences. Unfortunately, it's not (yet!) as complete as Marble/WorldWind/Google Earth.

I'm not sure this is a terribly stable equilibrium though. Consider what's been happening with cell phone companies lately. They were all charging about the same price, but a few months ago tmobile basically cut their prices in half. I just noticed that Verizon recently lowered their prices, and presumably at&t will or has too.

Actually, you're pretty close there. Most of the projects I've checked out I only look though, or only make very small changes or bug fixes. In the past I've used cvs, svn, git, hg, and mtn. There's a bit of learning curve with each of these. Conceptually it's not too hard, but I have a hard time keeping track of whether it's `foo checkout --head' or `foo revert', `foo log --max-count' or `foo log --limit', etc. If you can keep track of all of these, then good for you, but I can't and would rather not try.

I've noticed this as well, at least using git against other repos (git-svn, git-cvsimport), but it's always seemed like a kludge to me. I haven't looked into it, but I've always assumed that git-svn/git-cvsimport/git-* were specific to git, which means they would need to be reimplemented in hg, mtn, etc. A common format for pulling changes would mean you'd only have to implement one other protocol besides the native protocol.