Comment Re:How is this human to computer? (Score 1) 393
Yes, but he's running a fever now. Explain THAT.
Yes, but he's running a fever now. Explain THAT.
Where are you, "Doc" Smith?
The Germ-eshausen Professor. Heh.
Actually I think James Schmitz may have coined the term "wirehead" in "The Telzey Toy" (January 1971, Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact), sometimes reprinted as "Ti's Toys." But I could be wrong.
The last comment on the referred-to thread:
It didn't fix it.
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Kind regards
Thanks very much for your helpful comments. We have no choice, of course, ultimately, but to move to
I own an XP box on which the framework will not update from 1.x, and on every boot it bitches on the way up.
1) Maybe we messed up. Always possible, thanks for the link. We'll retry the benchmark, but it was staggeringly slow on our test case.
2) Whether the
"...better than VB which it definitely was!"
Um, have you benchmarked the resultant application? VB.Net compiled applications are many times slower than VB6 compiled applications. About 10 times slower for compute-intensive operations (where VB6 actually compares quite favorably to "manly" languages like C; only a small penalty is paid). Try an experiment and see.
Of course, if performance doesn't matter in your application, and if you're comfortable with your end users having to download hundreds of megabytes of crap that may fail to work entirely depending on what legacy version of Windows they're running, then sure, VB.Net is just wonderful.
"The problem "is mainly that computer systems are built for the accountants and managers and not built to help doctors, nurses and patients," the report's lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, said in an interview with Computerworld."
That's not the problem, and doctors aren't going to make money-saving decisions anyway (what planet is this guy from). The real problem is that hospital administrators are uninformed and powerless. For example, most hospitals use Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) that actually don't save them money, yet the administrators are convinced that everything's just fine and that they're all set. And most hospitals don't intervene in the purchasing decisions made by doctors -- they think, "zomg what if our Star Doctor leaves us and goes with Hospital X" -- so it's hands off on anything the prima donna decides to do. The result is that the hospital will not buy software that could save them money immediately on every purchase decision, and it will not second-guess any purchasing decisions made by its doctors.
Bottom line: they have met the enemy, and he is them.
Defensive? Of what? I'll plead to dismissive and mean, but come on. Two years of slave labor in liberal arts courses, before starting a four year program? Do you really think that's a good idea? Jesus.
Well, one could construct an elitist argument that, given the current application over-subscription, MIT could elect to be choosier about language skills. On the other hand, such a policy would preclude admission to talented foreign students and to others who haven't focused on those skills. I suspect that MIT Admissions strikes a good balance. They have always been very serious about analyzing their performance and refining their metrics.
I guess my answer would be, "both." But let's give a pass to those students who clearly don't need remedial instruction.
As an exercise that may be helpful to you in future, see if you can identify the flaw in your comment from this list of fallacious arguments: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html.
Then get off my lawn.
I went to MIT during the same time period. I wrote well when I arrived, so guess what? I wrote well when I left. The Humanities courses were a total waste of time for me. Thirty years on, I can't recall a single inspiring thought or insight that was transmitted to me by the unhappy and unpleasant faculty in the MIT Humanities Department.
You may have been some kind of weird-ass nerd genius ("the technical stuff was easy"), but please don't assume that everyone else requires two years of remedial training in order to become a human being. We don't.
It does work. Temporarily. I worked with a guy who had dropped out of chiropractic school when he realized that all he was doing was applying nerve blocks and other techniques that weren't really "curing" anything. He couldn't reconcile that with his personal moral code.
He once "cured" my neck pain in 5 seconds with some pressure to a spot in my upper back/neck. The "cure" worked for several hours, it was really miraculous. Then the pain came back, as he predicted it would.
That's their secret. They keep you coming back for relief, because the relief is real -- for a while. Is this better than taking lots of drugs? I'm sure it is, for some people. But the chiropractic claims that "spinal adjustment" has anything to do with anything at all are ridiculous and were disproved 50 years ago. See "Fads and Fallacies" by Martin Gardner for an interesting history and discussion of chiropractic.
In Manhattan, if you are new to the city, it's very easy to do a lot of walking before you can figure out E from W. Here's the scenario.
You climb out of the subway, say at the middle of W 28th (R or W line), trying to adjust to the bright outside light. You look around stupidly. Everyone else seems to know where they're going, and they're in a big hurry to get there, and you are creating a nuisance by standing still. You can't see the horizon because of the tall buildings. So it is not clear where the sun is, plus maybe it's noon or it's overcast or it's nighttime and it wouldn't help anyway. So you pick a random direction and start walking.
You've been told by people like the parent poster that it's easy to get around Manhattan because street numbers increase S to N and avenue numbers increase E to W. OK, say you ended up walking E on W28th to get to an avenue. Turns out it's Fifth Avenue. Cool, but you need another data point. So you keep walking. You get to "Madison Avenue." No help there, "Madison Avenue" doesn't have a number, so WTF. You keep walking. You get to "Park Avenue". Still no help. So you keep walking. You get to "Lexington Avenue." Still no help. Fuck! OK, turn around, walk the other way. Past Park, past Madison, back to Fifth, next Avenue... shit! "Avenue of the Americas." No help there. So you walk another block, and Hallelujah! It's Seventh. Congratulations. You're oriented. Too bad, you really wanted 3rd Avenue, which means you need to walk back the other way 6 blocks... past Avenue of the Americas, Fifth, Madison, Park, Lex, and whoo hoo finally you get to Third.
At this point you've walked 13 blocks, and these are Avenue blocks, not street blocks. Maybe you've walked about 1.5 miles at this point, maybe 2. That's a lot of walking, 30-40 minutes minimally, given waiting for traffic lights and so on.
OK, OK, New Yorkers, you've been jumping up and down yelling "THE STREETS CHANGE THEIR NAMES AT FIFTH AVENUE YOU DUMMY!" Yes, in the example above, the street name changes from "W 28th" to "E 28th" after we passed Fifth Avenue the first time. That's certainly an important clue -- but hell, I already KNOW I'm on 28th, so I'm not exactly studying the damn street sign to see if I'm still on it, am I? The change from "W" to "E" is easy to miss. And I could set up the problem such that I started on the east side, and I would still do a lot of walking.
And don't even get me started on lower Manhattan where the streets stop having numbers at all and start going in completely random directions, along with the subways, which as soon as they enter Lower Manhattan, feel the need to make a zillion right-angle turns amid much squealing of wheels, as though they're confused too.
Bottom line: before you walk around Manhattan, have a street map (in some form) with you. At least memorize the Avenue names and their ordering. And, yeah, it does help in some cases to remember that the street names change from "E " to "W " at Fifth Avenue.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.