Re: Little knowledge that can change lives

[Sweeper]

You cannot use top-down analysis for everyday's problems. We live in a world populated by humans. You have to adopt a holistic approach: simultaneously top-down, bottom-up, sideways, diagonal, intuitive et cetera. Just look at the difference between parsing a programming language such as Pascal and a high-level language such as English (or Perl).

If you really want top-down analysis for everyday's problems maybe you should apply for a immigration visa to the Vulcan planet.

Top-down is part of the solution. It is not the solution.

[CodeHound]

EVERY problem can be simplified in a top-down scheme.
Read this:
It's like zooming out in a map. Suppose I need to get to California(CA) from Texas(TX).
In the extreme detail, I can descrive the journey like an endless turning and stopping and crossing (3500 elements, for example).
If I zoom out a little, I understand I need to cross different countries (35 elements).
If I zoom out even more, I understand I need to cross New Mexico(NM) and Arizona(AZ).
I believe this is not just an exception. Planning, and 'top-downing' an every day's life problem is possible (even if you sometimes are required to do some left-to-right and forward'n'backward(fuel, health, lodging, etc.) :).
I hope I got the point, and made myself clear, anyhow.

[Anonymous Monk]

dict granularity
--- [from wn] ---
granularity
     n : the quality of being composed of relatively large particles
         [syn: {coarseness}, {graininess}]

--- [from foldoc] ---
granularity

   <jargon, parallel> The size of the units of {code} under
   consideration in some context.  The term generally refers to
   the level of detail at which code is considered, e.g. "You can
   specify the granularity for this profiling tool".

   The most common computing use is in parallelism where "fine
   grain parallelism" means individual tasks are relatively small
   in terms of code size and execution time, "coarse grain" is
   the opposite.  You talk about the "granularity" of the
   parallelism.

   The smaller the granularity, the greater the potential for
   parallelism and hence speed-up but the greater the overheads
   of synchronisation and communication.

   (1997-05-08)

[Anonymous Monk]

I believe what Ole was trying to say is that you need a uni-directional attack, a checklist if you will. It's anyone's guess why he chose to say Top-Down, but it makes sense seeing how that's how i'm typing this right now, top down ;)