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Adam Maras wrote: (in our case, get off the computer Poke tongue ).
why?????
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.
-- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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It's nonsense; I can't even determine how the statements relate to each other.
The student must have an aptitude for the subject; otherwise you wind up with a program as misshapen as my sculptures. 
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mud pies - yah mud pies.
I have had a yearning to be a sculptor for decades, even took lessons and tried it a couple of time. I have the ability to make slumpy piles of clay, wriggly clay lines and I can cover an entire room with muck if you give me one of those spinny things.
Thankfully my development skills are slightly more attuned to success.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Maybe it's not meant to be taken literally, but metaphorically.
Obviously Michelangelo needed to learn how to sculpt, HOWEVER, he was so good at it that you might suggest that the only way he wouldn't be able to sculpt if it was actually taught not to...
A bit like the throw-away line "I've forgotten more about XYZ than you ever knew".
Someone who is so ridiculously good at what they do that it seems that the only way they could suck at it is if they were taught to (suck at it).
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I would say it means anyone can be taught to do something but not everyone can excel.
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That was my intuitive understanding, too:
You can teach everyone to sculpt.
However, Michelangelo would break all the rules and right-ways-to-do-things taught to a "hobby sculptor". So to teach Michelangelo to sculpt (the way everyone does), you first have to teach him to not use his own way.
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With the advent of the open source “community”, we have gone from cheap, outsourced development to completely free development. Let’s look at what is happening at google with the Chromium project.
http://blog.chromium.org/2009/06/plausible-promise.html[^]
Open source projects aren't simply about a runnable binary, they're about the community of users, testers, and developers who devote their time and skills to working on a product they believe in.
The last time I looked, google wasn't a charity. How many people donate their time and skills to working for Ford on a car they believe in?
From http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit[^]
In one TGIF in Kirkland, an employee informed Eric Schmidt that Microsoft’s benefits package was richer. He announced himself genuinely surprised, which genuinely surprised me. Schmidt, in the presence of witnesses, promised to bring the benefits to a par. He consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money. They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a billionaire.
Mr. Schmidt is truly brilliant – the pied piper of software development. He has made billions, and now has conned the “community” of sandal-clad geeks into working for him for free. Thank God we have people like Mr. Schmidt who will make the personal sacrifice to take on all of those headaches that come with being rich.
As George Orwell said, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." Capitalism has been criticized as the little guy making the big guy rich. Well, no one is forcing these people to work for free -- but sh*t.
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yeah, the people who advocate open source as the panacea, obviously have enough money that they don't need to work.
Christian Graus
Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista.
"! i don't exactly like or do programming and it only gives me a headache." - spotted in VB forums.
I can do things with my brain that I can't even google. I can flex the front part of my brain instantly anytime I want. It can be exhausting and it even causes me vision problems for some reason. - CaptainSeeSharp
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This isn't a surprise. 
Where I work it it is a good environment but we also get paid well.
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A few days ago, I decided to sync my (Mobile 5.0) PDA with my (XP) workstation at home. I hadn't done it for a few days but it had always worked properly before so I wasn't prepared for what happened.
I put the PDA in the cradle, and ActiveSync sprung into life. After whirring and clunking for a while, it informed me it was having a problem connecting to my PDA. After a quick google, I checked the new ActiveSync Troubleshooter, which informed me that my problem was that I had ZoneAlarm activated. This confused me because I don't have ZoneAlarm installed.
Over the next few days, I tried all sorts of things. I installed and uninstalled ZoneAlarm; I uninstalled, downloaded and re-installed ActiveSync; I googled, clustied and asked everyone and everything I could think of. I searched my pc for vsmon.exe, unsuccessfully. I cleaned up my registry from top to tail. I rebooted my pc a dozen times or more. I consulted my local pc repair place who suggested switching off my virus checker, which I did, alsong with my (Windows native) firewall. All to no avail.
Finally, out of sheer desperation, I performed a hard reset on my PDA which - naturally - worked!! Troubleshooter was doubly wrong - firstly in telling me that the problem was with ZoneAlarm when I don't have it installed; and secondly, to infer the problem was with my pc when it was actually with my PDA.
Grrrrrrr.
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Of course, you could do without gadgets...
*Elaine ducks*
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I was investigating whether a subset of F# can be used as a DSL. I must say that some of the features in F# are neat. Specifically, I like the support for Unit of Measures.
Clickety[^]
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There has been a discussion about that on comp.lang.misc (students like me still use usenet, surprised?) and IIRC they came to the conclusion that while it is nice in general, the conversions between units depend on the area of science you're in, eg it doesn't usually make much sense to allow energy/mass conversions outside of quantum mechanics.
IMO that still doesn't make it bad to have unit support, but you'd have to be careful using it.
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harold aptroot wrote: eg it doesn't usually make much sense to allow energy/mass conversions outside of quantum mechanics.
must....resist.....being....a....pedantic....physicist
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity. --Lazarus Long
Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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Heh, nice. 
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How big is a gallon? How big is a pint? 
What surprised pissed me off yesterday was I found out that the coffee maker industry considers a Cup to be five (fluid) ounces! 
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: What surprised pissed me off yesterday was I found out that the coffee maker industry considers a Cup to be five (fluid) ounces!
Yeah. 
That nearly resulted in me purchasing a very-much-too-small press some time ago... thankfully, i decided to visit the store instead of ordering online.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: How big is a gallon? How big is a pint?
Do you mean American Pints/Gallons or British(aka correct) Pints/Gallons?
print "http://www.codeproject.com".toURL().textAin't that Groovy?
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This is some pretty cool stuff.
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity. --Lazarus Long
Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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What I found most interesting about that article was the first paragraph
The first paragraph: Do you remember NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter? It was lost in September 1999 because of a confusion between metric and so-called "English" units of measurement. The report into the disaster made many recommendations. In all likelihood, the accident could have been prevented if the NASA engineers had been able to annotate their program code with units, and then employed static analysis tools or language-level type-checking to detect and fix any unit errors.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't next month the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon? Back then they had smart people, huge sheets of paper, draftsmen, slide-rules and about the same amount of global computing power that you'd find in a typical digital watch nowadays. No need for programming language additions - they had expertise, competence and communication skills.
Are we all too reliant on technology, relying on machines to do our error correction (and/or thinking) for us? Do we actually have the competence, expertise and communication skills nowadays to successfully put men (or women) on the moon?
Well if NASA can bugger it up so badly, I'd submit not. People would either be googling the answer to "What's the correct oxygen/nitrogen mix for a 1/4 million mile journey through space" or be too busy playing flash games to be bothered to ask.
print "http://www.codeproject.com".toURL().textAin't that Groovy?
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Based on a few of your recent posts, I am sensing a general disenchantment towards technology in you. Is that true?
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In a sense, yes. For all the good that technology does I have the very real feeling that it does more harm than good. We've existed as a species on this planet for thousands of years without the need for computers, and yet despite this "age of information and communication", I can't help but feel we know less and communicate less than ever before.
print "http://www.codeproject.com".toURL().textAin't that Groovy?
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I have a disenchantment towards tech myself. And yes, it's fairly recent too, on the scale of less than 2 years.
Cheers, Vikram. Recent activities:
TV series: Friends, season 9
Books: Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner.
Carpe Diem.
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I honestly don't know what happened to N. American culture. But somewhere along the way it became cool to be a bonehead and engineering types allowed themselves to be pigeonholed into thinking that communication was something their managers did for them. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. Nothing highlights this more for me when I hear techies say stuff like "what you do has to be your passion." Please, pioneers like Jack Kilby were well rounded, could communicate well and, had lots of things they were passionate about.
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity. --Lazarus Long
Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. --Ralph Charell
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Chris Austin wrote: Nothing highlights this more for me when I hear techies say stuff like "what you do has to be your passion."
IMHO, the word "passion" is over-used. I don't really care if my co-workers are passionate about programming; heck, if anything, it's easier to work with people who understand that the things we do are just a small part of a much, much bigger picture.
But i do want to work with people who care enough about what they do to do a half-decent job of it. Who take enough pride in their work to refrain from dumping crap on those who do.
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