Posts by Shakje

QM book

I found Alastair Rae's Quantum Mechanics: A Beginner's Guide to be a fantastic introduction. It has some basic maths in sideboxes (and there are a couple of errors in it as well, but they're not difficult to spot) but can be read without any real understanding of the maths, and explains QM in terms of practical applications. It's a very well written book and worth a read and defies the idea that QM is some sort of hocus pocus that no-one can describe without maths or jargon. Saying all that, because I have an interest in physics I'm now looking at books which DO go into mathematical detail, and enjoying it further.

Hawking's new book was a little disappointing as it doesn't have significantly more detail than ABHoT, although I did appreciate the extra it did have. I think if you want a very, very brief overview of QM it's useful, but Rae was easier to read, I think because it went into more detail he didn't have to cram things into a small section. It's a good book and worth buying if you have an interest in physics, but I found it a bit light, although maybe it kicked off my appetite a bit.

@thecakeis(not)alie

Welcome to the internet, enjoy your stay.

GOTO is for noobs

10: COMEFROM 20

Look, I get your point and all

but what if that person is the way they are because they were abused as a child? And what if, after living a life essentially determined by their abuser, they get proper help, understand that what they did was awful and wrong, and become a model citizen? Should they not be allowed a job? It's not a black and white issue, and while I deplore the crimes that they commit that doesn't mean that there's not an underlying reason for what they do that means that there's absolutely nothing that they can do about their urges. It's not the swearing that isn't big or clever, deciding that it is a black and white issue and then railing against anyone who disagrees with you and calling them names is the bit that makes you look childish. You sound like the sort of person who thinks vigilantism is a good thing and that torture is the best way to get information from someone. Just fucking grow up.

Postgrads teaching

With a wife who has a PHD I find the issue of postgrad lecturing difficult. The problem is that many universities will not consider someone highly, even as a basic lecturer, who has not got some teaching experience. I think the real problem is that there's no formally accepted training system in universities for 'teacher training', but you can see the reasons for this. PHD students have already spent at least 5 years as a student, and are looking at at least another 3 years on top of that, so what do you think would happen if they were required to spend another year or two doing teacher training to become a lecturer? It's practically impossible to fit in proper training in a Masters or PHD schedule without increasing the length (for some people I could see how this could be done, but it wouldn't be fair on those with heavier content doctorates, and it might also affect private funding if they thought that some of their money was going towards teacher training instead of benefiting the private sector). You would end up with more and more postgrads going into research and private jobs and less and less lecturers, which in turn would lead to less qualified lecturers as universities tried to fill positions with the people that were willing to learn to teach rather than spend time on their own subject.

I can fully understand that it's not a perfect process, but teaching experience is vital to PHD students if they wish to pursue lecturing. What I think could be done is to make sure that postgrads begin by teaching tutorial groups instead of full lectures, but, being bluntly honest, when I was at uni I had my fair share of bad full-time lecturers (who seemed glued to just reading out their notes) as well as plenty of very good ones, and I think one thing that you should take away from uni is that you won't always get the best person communicating the content, but that it's the content that's important. If you can't grasp this I can see it being very difficult to operate in a business setting.

@Avatar of They

The functionality maybe roughly the same but devaluing the GUI is like saying that VS and Eclipse are the same if you're coding in C++. The two camps are split as to which is better, but each finds productivity reasons why they prefer their own one despite the fact that the overall function of the thing is the same - to compile code. Personally I find the ribbon saves a lot of time, but that might just be me or just might be perception.

Re: I don't fear change...

Really? An hour? It took me about an hour to get used to the interface (including a few trips to help, and colleague questions) and in Word I find it actually enjoyable to write something that is formatted well and a decent quality instead of a chore because it's so easy. Excel is a different matter but really only because we're already used to something and a specific way of doing it. The thing about the ribbon is that when you get a feel for how the categories split up it's dead easy to find stuff. It's also incredibly clear from memory-enhancing techniques that having something to visualise as well as order means you'll remember things quicker and clearer.

The fact that there isn't consistency across applications is a moot point, we've already got a 3rd party app that implement a ribbon, and guess what, it's better for it too.

I really don't get it, I can only imagine that the people who have such difficulty are the same sort of people who complained about the change from Win 3.1 to 95 and said it was useless and impossible to use instead of those of us who continually came across things that we liked and were impressed by.

When you say equivalent

do you mean equivalent hardware or some definition of equivalent using product numbers?

Re: Climate Change Dogma

The problem is that it's not a healthy scepticism. Healthy scepticism would be questioning the evidence then coming to conclusions based on that evidence, in the case of El Reg the general view has been to cherry-pick its stories to frame climate change science in a negative light. Also, while science never proves anything, there are points where it's sensible to accept the generally held consensus in view of overwhelming evidence, the theory of gravitation for one. Scepticism tells us that the theory isn't complete, but it does describe our observations. There is a tonne of bias on here towards the anti side of things, and as such there's a far larger number of stories that suggest an anti stance than there are which report on findings for the pro stance (something that's completely the reverse of the balance of publications). Further to that it seems quite ok to make appeals to authority like the one in this article, while using derisive language against people who they don't agree with (although boffin isn't one of those words). It's a shame because a lot of the reporting is very good, and they have some very good writers. It seems that there's a decent portion of readers who agree with the first poster as well given the upvotes.

News Just In

Criminal gangs are using telephone communication to plan their crimes.

A title is required

Consequences will never be the same.

I came across a Christian Scientist not too long ago

and they're completely mad. They believe that the physical world doesn't exist, and because of this are strong advocates of faith healing. While they accept science as a whole, they have really wacky ideas, and while it may well be a very reputable news publication, I would always approach something that is based on such ridiculous ideas as a slightly dodgy source.

While all this may not sound as crazy as some religious beliefs, if you take some time to look into how they came to these beliefs and what they practice they're as bonkers as homeopathy, and as dangerous to their members as scientology.

I have a masochistic bent of arguing with creationists

and there are a variety of different creationist arguments, the most popular being (in no particular order):

1) young earthers

2) the earth is old but God created it in stages, just long stages, that match Genesis (specifically JWs). This also necessitates that macroevolution does not occur, but many rationalise that evolution occurs within the bounds of 'kinds' (it's woolly at best)

3) the earth is old and everything evolved except humans, which god placed on earth perfectly formed

All of them are very poor arguments in light of the evidence, but they just can't see that.

Pretty sure that

man clothed himself, he didn't invent the clothes. Presumably if the tree of knowledge let man realise he was nude and had to be clothed, and God is assumed as the most knowledgeable being in the universe, God wore clothes before man. So God did invent clothes.

@david wilson

I think you're on the right lines, but you haven't reached the inevitable conclusion. There are, I think, generally two classes of file sharer. There's the one that does try before they buy (I tend to fall into this category, most of the games I've bought I've bought out of respect for the developer after trying it, same goes for music, although it's a very rare occurrence that I'll download music or films these days) and you can say that they're not really lost sales, because most of the time they will indeed buy what they have downloaded out of a feeling of principle for the people that have created it. On the other side you have people who download everything in sight. They go onto torrent sites every week at least and just grab whatever's out there. This behaviour is probably significantly different from what they do when they go shopping (assuming there wasn't P2P), where they probably can't actually afford to grab much. I'd guess that there really are lost sales, because when you're like that (I was at one point) it's a lot easier to just download something you like and not bother paying for it. This is probably more true with the decline of physical media, and lack of desire to actually own something physical. The thing is, the number of lost sales is probably minimal, and as they get older and maturer (not to mention richer), this sort of person is more likely to develop into the first kind of file sharer.

The problem is that there's no way of stopping people getting free full-quality recordings, and it's going to happy one way or another. Let's imagine that suddenly the internet stopped working, do you really think that there would be no-one passing around memory sticks with music on?

The other problem is that the recording industry and the cinema industry are completely shooting themselves in the foot. I went to see Inception (eventually) the other week and at the start it told me to support the film industry by going to the cinema. I was in the cinema. I had paid 8 quid odd for my ticket. I'm not the person that they need to be telling, and realistically is 8 quid a ticket going to be sustainable? It's as if they've decided that because less people are coming to the cinema they can fix it by jacking up the prices. With the abundance of home cinema equipment and especially in the current economic climate, it's just completely unrealistic to expect people to value the cinema over a DVD these days, unless it's accessible and cheap. It has advantages, but people just aren't going to continue paying through the nose for, with most films, completely negligible advantages. I wanted to see Inception at the cinema because of the quality of the film (I didn't watch it beforehand either), but very rarely do I see any need to watch something on a cinema screen as opposed to watching a DVD of it with extras and bonuses (I'm also one of the geeky people who actually listens to commentaries on films).

Both industries feel that the best way they can retain their audience is by fruitlessly targeting people who are always going to be one step ahead. How long has their campaign against piracy been going on now? And how are sales looking? Are they increasing or decreasing? Is it directly proportional to levels of piracy? They know the answers, they just can't seem to take the fact that it's their own fault.

Isn't the point

that if they didn't go to an independent legal firm then people like you would accuse them of fudging the details or lying to make themselves come out smelling of roses?

Not a complete cow, no

but it's still a significantly DIFFERENT way. I find DirectX far more enjoyable to use than OpenGL.

Seriously....

Does no-one actually remember when Hotmail and Yahoo were the only real providers of free email addresses? Even with other ones I've sometimes ended up seeing about 50 spam mails come through in a single day. Also, nothing wrong with conversations.

The real problem is...

C coders who didn't code particularly well in C being unleashed on C++. I've seen numerous examples of legacy code done by people with that background which ends up with huge classes that do lots of different things. Or using polymorphism only to needlessly break it a few lines later. Or sprinkling mallocs in code. And so on...

Granted the problem isn't necessarily that they were C coders beforehand, but at least part of it is that they think functionally and with a C-mindset instead of a C++ one and didn't spend the time switching that mindset before starting to write C++. For what it's worth I agree that C++ coders should learn C first, for the same reason that I think any C-style OO language developer should have a grounding in C++ first.

Currently...

I have a double-sized taskbar with 3 instances of notepad, 10 explorer windows, VSS, 2 spreadsheets, 3 Word docs, a few emails, a couple of emulators, some command prompts, the SCM, Winamp and 3 instances of VS2005 running, and Firefox. In these circumstances I have no easy way of managing lots of windows (and yes I do need all of them open right now). Tabs are good in these circumstances, and considerably better than Windows just seeing "10 Firefox" in my taskbar, don't you think?

For clarity, I currently have 4 MSDN pages open, ASCIITable, a couple of small articles on specialised subjects, Xkcd, TheDailyWTF (it is lunch after all) and El Reg.

I understand what you're saying about using windowed instances to manage tabgroups but at the end of the day, the one time I really don't want to have to spend time messing around with different windows is my lunch break. And for me this is not necessarily something that I would be dying to see in a new version, but it IS something that might make my life easier.

I guess that the real difficulty is

if you really are objective, you can't let the person whose documents they are cow you into not releasing stuff. If the US are really worried about people dying (and I do actually worry about it myself) they should aid in the censoring of the data. If their aim is just to stop the data getting out full stop then they don't really have a leg to stand on.

I think it comes down to this, if there were documents about Soviet agents which clearly showed them committing crimes on foreign turf, and it could lead to their deaths if the documents were released, should an independent source not release those documents? I think a journalist, or whoever has the documents has a moral obligation to do their absolute utmost to prevent the loss of human life through their work (even if this means delaying the information a few months), and I'll be greatly saddened and angered if Wikileaks doesn't put their utmost effort into removing information that could put people in danger, but I also think that they have a moral obligation to put out the truth, and simply brushing it under the carpet instead of doing what's necessary is equally reprehensible.

@Sarah

No, they can't. Don't be so silly.

And leave them with nothing

but a copy of ISS.

@h4rm0ny

The coin toss is actually even better, because the further in the future you predict the 50:50 result, the closer it will be to 50:50.

This is just too perfect.

If you're a coder and you can't hit {} quicker than you can type 8 other characters then you must be pretty slow. I wager I can type {}<> far quicker than I can type beginend (in fact I just did).

Also (forgot to say)

the API help is meant as a quick reference, nothing more (and usually it's enough if you've spent some time reading a good book before starting, presumably you did this to get your language knowledge up to the same level as you have in Java, you should probably find yourself relying less on API help than in Java if you get to know the language, because it's generally more structured than Java, I find anyway, and once again I'm assuming .NET), if you really want a detailed description either buy and install MSDN or go to Google, type in the class or method name followed by "MSDN". MSDN is a far better reference site than the documentation on Java, but that's more a style thing and I guess you have to get used to its structure a little first.