When has Microsoft demonstrated any vision beyond marketing? Microsoft makes profit out of their monopolies (Windows and Office) only. Everything else loses them money. Check out their annual reports if you don't believe me.

I wrote a blog-entry about this.

Blog entry about the lack of innovation at Microsoft and some perspective.

Beware: it's *cough* my blog, so this is a *cough* shameless plug *sneeze*.

Damn right.

Consider that at 24 fps, the shutter remains open for 1/24 sec. Try taking sharp pictures with a camera having a 1/24 sec shutter time - anything that moves will not be sharp. Now, you might think that decreasing the shutter time to say 1/100 sec or 1/250 sec, and play back at 24 fps solves the issue. It doesn't. Especially in sports, for instance a tennis match, you would see this: o o o o o o. The tennis ball will be sharp, but seems to appear multiple times when moving at high speed. Not acceptable.

Cameron is damn right - only higher frame rates allow for faster shutter speeds and sharper images.

And damn those tv manufacturers with their snake-oil "interpolation frames" that do not help at all to get a sharper picture.

Although it is not possible to reconstruct a fingerprint from the hash, it may be possible to verify a fingerprint against the fingerprint database.

Even the suggestion that this is possible, is already unwanted.

Smart-ass teacher: "Don't try anything nasty, because we will search for fingerprints and look who did it!"

These are the kind of worries kids can do without.

It's just not a good idea.

Ok, "refined" should perhaps have read "adapted".

What I meant to say is that a theory that has to be constantly backfitted to match observations instead of predicting those observations loses credibility.

I'd love to see how the Big Bang theory fits observations that the universe is open (i.e., expanding at an accelerating pace). Oh yeah, of course, dark matter has been invented to backfit these observations... brilliant. Good luck with that!

"Also the Big Bang makes predictions of the distributions - relative amounts, or abundance - of the light elements and their isotopes."

I think you have it backwards. The Big Bang theory was "refined" to match the observed distributions of the light elements.

If the observed distribution was in line with some previously established predictions that the BB theory brought forward, then it would have added significantly to the theory's credibility. Backfitting a theory to observed data hurts its credibility.

The observational "evidence" has required the BB theory to be refined frequently. In itself there's nothing wrong with refining a theory, but a theory having to be refined a lot starts to lose its credibility.

About the word "perhaps": the whole BB theory itself is a big "perhaps", especially as there are other explanations possible for the same observations. It's just that currently, the consensus is that the BB theory fits these observations the best.

Bullshit. Attacking a theory does not mean attacking the observations it's based on.

Allright then...

Perhaps the universe started completely empty and gradually filled up our universe with energy, particles, creating space and time gradually. Perhaps the existance of space induces the creation of energy in our universe.

That may also explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. Since there is increasingly more space, energy gets created at an accelerated pace in our universe.

Energy can't appear out of nothing. That's why I say our universe. Conservation of energy demands "negative" energy to have been created simultaneously in such a way our universe can't interact with it (or we would have never existed).

...and assuming the big bang theory is correct (which I have the audacity to doubt upon).

Perhaps a stupid question, but is 500 million years enough time for all of these spiral galaxies to form?

is releasing new functionality as quickly as possible. Timelines counts, not code quality.

One of the classic arguments between manager and coder is about how much time should be invested in cleaner code, since, as most coders would argue, such investment earns itself back because new features can be implemented faster when having a nice and tidy code base.

Managers of course often get their ways and coders reluctantly give in, mumbling about code becoming unmaintainable.

Investing in code quality is indeed risky:

- Even despite poor code quality, the coders know their stuff and implement new functionality without any problems;
- After investing in code cleanups it may soon turn out that this particular functionality is no longer required and all this nice and tidy code has been developed for nothing;
- "Cleanups" may end up in overly complicated code which turns out to be even more difficult to maintain than the original code base.