Jonathan

Note Howard Dean’s comments:

WEST PALM BEACH — Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said Sunday he hoped the capture of Saddam Hussein will change “the course of the occupation of Iraq.”

Also:

“This, I hope, will change the course of the occupation of Iraq but I think the first order of business is to say this is a great day. I congratulate the Iraqi people,” Dean said.

Dean is right that it’s a great day, and it’s decent of him to congratulate President Bush. But note Dean’s repetition of his comment about “[changing] the course of the occupation of Iraq.” He appears to be setting up the argument for U.S. withdrawal: Hussein is gone, now it’s time for us to get out.

Look for it.

UPDATE: Power Line comments.

Glenn Reynolds has a thoughtful post, with many links, on this subject. There are arguments.

Most of the arguments are silly. Use the technology that’s best for you. Image resolution is far from being the only dimension of comparison or even the most important one.

I carry a camera partly to capture interesting sights and scenery that I run into, but mainly as an aide-memoire. Keeping a record of where I’ve been and who I’ve been with seems increasingly important as I get older. So while the easy workflow of digital cameras is important for pros who make large numbers of images, for me it is most important to create a permanent record. Film, especially conventional B&W film, is good for this. (Digital archiving requires, at best, regular attention to transferring files as computer equipment is upgraded and standards change.)

For the unplanned slice-of-life and people photos that I like to make, small digicams are too slow to use and have mediocre viewfinders and too much depth of field, while digital SLRs are too big. The kind of camera that best suits my needs is the old-fashioned compact rangefinder, for which there is not yet a good digital substitute. I suspect that such an substitute will be introduced eventually, and when it is another bunch of film diehards will painlessly convert. This kind of switch-over should occur with increasing frequency as photographic subspecialties catch up with technological advances in the mass market.

However, some people will probably continue to prefer film, if only for its archival properties. For this reason alone it seems likely that film, particularly silver-based B&W film, will be available for the foreseeable future, even if only as a boutique item.

Also note that whatever cameras people use, the files generated by scanning film are practically the same as digicam files. And note that Photoshop and similar software are already well on their way to replacing the traditional darkroom. In other words, much professional and high-end hobby photography has already been digital for years, so does it really matter what kinds of cameras were used to produce all those digital files?

The boy seems a bit, um, hostile.

(Via gefen)

I am trying to get a programming task done using a version of BASIC that produces super-fast code but has a crummy debugger. Execution speed is a big deal for what I’m doing, and I already know how to use this compiler, so I don’t really want to switch. And I don’t particularly like Visual Basic — the obvious alternative — because it’s relatively complex and probably doesn’t produce code that runs as fast.

However, VB has an excellent debugger, and right now I am dead in the water because I can’t figure out how to get a particular bit of code to run. I assume that there is a subtle syntax error or variable mismatch, but my debugger doesn’t provide enough info to diagnose such problems without a lot of trial and error. I don’t think I would have had such a difficult time if I were using VB.

So the tradeoff is between the time I spend debugging and the time I save by using the fast-executing code generated by this hot-shit compiler. Maybe there would be no problem if I were a better programmer, but I’m not, and I’m not sure that I wouldn’t have been better off overall if I had used VB from the start.

I’m also not sure who is the idiot here. Probably it’s me. The compiler designer is merely doing what he does best, he represented the product accurately, and I chose to buy it, so I can’t blame him. But maybe I shouldn’t have been so attracted by the siren song of fast code at the expense of easy debugging. (And maybe I should have realized that a specialized product designed by an individual is likely to have flaws reflecting the designer’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, a brilliant designer of compilers might see less need for a first-class debugger than would a marginal programmer like me.)

Compilers are like vehicles and other technology in that speed is not necessarily the most important feature from a user’s perspective. Speed needs to be balanced against ease of use and other characteristics, and each user will have his own preferred set of tradeoffs.