Yeah, sounds great. Almost as great as the Office Assistant. You've got to be careful not to let the marketing droids have a say in it, though, otherwise you'll get Clippy...
You're right in that simple examples don't do it justice. And yeah, Java inner classes have closure, which is nice, although it feels clumsy to use them. That's at least one thing going for Java, I suppose.
What I really want to know is how you got that indentation.
I assume LAMBDA is some dynamic definition of the named parameter
No, lambda defines an anonymous function with closure. It's simply amazing, and the listing above does it no justice at all, mostly due to the broken way that Python handles lambdas. I'd tell you to check out lambda calculus, but it comes across as hard maths (because, to a degree, it is), but really, it's fantastically simple.
Say you wanted to iterate over a list of numbers, squaring the result, and then adding up the total. This could be done with
Ignore the dashes, I don't know how to indent inside one of those bastards. What this does is take list and maps the lambda to each item (which squares them), returning a list containing all the squares to reduce, which then applies the + operator to all of the items in that list, satisfying our requirement. Three very simple lines in Lisp, a shitload of lines in C.
Do demonstrate closure, let's take map, and make a function that takes a list and adds a number to every item, and then returns the resulting list.
See how we just created a function on the fly, that refers to variables defined locally, but outside the lambda? We can return a lambda from a function that refers to local bindings inside that function as well, if we want. Hell, we can do what we like, lambdas are just objects like anything else. This is closure.
Those two properties, together, are incredibly powerful. It's fantastically easy to make abstractions that are simply impossible in a language without them, unless you're prepared to put up with lots of boilerplate and obfuscation.
Honestly, before I met this fellow, I was wedded to OOP. Now I'm not so sure. I can do OOP with lambdas, but the other way round? Messy, very messy.
Many Windows features have traumatised me, but none have affected me quite so much as Sticky Keys. Even now, years after I last used XP for any serious amount of time, I'm still mortally afraid of the shift key. I sort of tiptoe daintily around it; my rational self is saying "you're on Linux, it's fine," but underneath, there's the fear, the pure animal fear echoing through me, "beware the Sticky Keys!!!"
In the US, it was all about "mercury based preservatives" causing untold woe and suffering.
In the UK, it was all "oh it'll give you autism."
Both claims were basically specious, and they were both cut from the same cloth -- luddism. There is, and has been since pretty much their inception, a staunch group of idiots that want to do away with vaccines, God only knows why.
I'm beyond cynical when it comes to the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies ("social anxiety," anyone?), but you're basically invoking a conspiracy theory in an attempt to discredit epidemiology. If you're going to attack a fundamentally sound discipline, you're going to have to do better than misunderstandings of chemistry and "oh, that nasty Big Pharma wants to kill you" rhetoric.
Yes, because the bar has been set so low, on paper these acts could be used to effect total speech gridlock. Find the words of your boss telling you to work insulting? Bang the fucker up. Disturbed by that billboard you see on your way to work every day? Take 'em down. And so on and so forth, etc etc.
Nobody seems to have really grokked the implications of these laws yet (well, apart from arms companies and what have you), so they haven't really been tested. Who knows how the courts will handle something like that. Would be interesting.
It's odd that they're still using the Public Order Act 1986, when the Protection From Harassment Act 1997 or Serious Organised Crime and Policing Act 2005 pretty much give the authorities carte blanche to silence protest. One would have thought the police would have realised the amount of power they actually have now.
The Protection from Harassment Act allows the Crown to prosecute anyone causing a person "alarm or distress" if this involves "conduct on at least two occasions." Conduct, it tells us, "includes speech"(5). Under this law, in other words, it is not necessary to demonstrate "threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour" to secure a prosecution.... the first three people prosecuted were all peaceful protesters. It is now used routinely against non-violent animal rights protesters and people demonstrating peacefully outside military bases and at arms fairs.
...
The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act would have been even more useful. Buried in the middle of this enormous piece of legislation, and missed by every MP who debated the bill, is a section on "harassment intended to deter lawful activities". Under this act, the definition of a "course of conduct" is broadened to include causing alarm or distress to "two or more persons"(6). In other words, Green would only have had to approach two revellers once to have fallen under suspicion of breaching the act. It appears to have been deliberately designed to criminalise protest. "Harassment" now involves seeking "to persuade any person... not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or to do something that he is not under any obligation to do."(7) Again, there is no defence for peaceful protest.
I think the lesson we can draw from this is that it's fantastically easy to make bad user interfaces. The truly horrific thing in this case is that there is no support email that I can find, you have to do support requests on their forum, which is broken, too.
It's a shame, really, because I was rather enjoying it.
OK, so I gave FoldIt a go (it's at fold.it). It's based on the idea of using lots of people to do protein folding rather than automating it or giving the task to phDs. The main gameplay elements are two buttons, "shake" and "wiggle." You basically just move the strands around randomly, then push those two buttons until you hit an acceptable score. Maybe there's more depth to it, but that's about all I could surmise.
Still pretty fun though, and it runs in Wine.
My one piece of advice: make sure the password for the site account doesn't have any funny characters in it. It will say "yeah, sure, that's a fine password" when you register, but if you ever try to use it it will tell you it's wrong, and the password recovery process is utterly broken. You are given a single-use login token, which claims that it's directing you to a page where you can set up a new password, but all you'll ever be taken to is an "access denied" page. So standard web interface stuff, I suppose. *sigh*
You said it. Without Linux, the ULPC market wouldn't exist in the first place. The freedom provided by Linux is what allowed that particular innovation to happen.
I'm not so sure myself. Could it be that that chips are getting really cheap, as per Moore's Law? So cheap that a piece of software on it significantly affects the price? That there was another option did give these hardware chaps another option, so you're right in that respect.
Was their reason for considering such an option driven by other factors, though? Potentially hardware? I'm unable to say myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, if GnuSense didn't get any takers last month, pimping it again won't make much difference.
English is a language that uses the Latin alphabet.
Ah, thanks. It would help if that was actually listed as an allowed tag, but hey.
Yeah, sounds great. Almost as great as the Office Assistant. You've got to be careful not to let the marketing droids have a say in it, though, otherwise you'll get Clippy...
Oh yeah, and your second example doesn't meet the requirement.
Is Quake obscene or not?
You're right in that simple examples don't do it justice. And yeah, Java inner classes have closure, which is nice, although it feels clumsy to use them. That's at least one thing going for Java, I suppose.
What I really want to know is how you got that indentation.
No, lambda defines an anonymous function with closure. It's simply amazing, and the listing above does it no justice at all, mostly due to the broken way that Python handles lambdas. I'd tell you to check out lambda calculus, but it comes across as hard maths (because, to a degree, it is), but really, it's fantastically simple.
Say you wanted to iterate over a list of numbers, squaring the result, and then adding up the total. This could be done with
Ignore the dashes, I don't know how to indent inside one of those bastards. What this does is take list and maps the lambda to each item (which squares them), returning a list containing all the squares to reduce, which then applies the + operator to all of the items in that list, satisfying our requirement. Three very simple lines in Lisp, a shitload of lines in C.
Do demonstrate closure, let's take map, and make a function that takes a list and adds a number to every item, and then returns the resulting list.
See how we just created a function on the fly, that refers to variables defined locally, but outside the lambda? We can return a lambda from a function that refers to local bindings inside that function as well, if we want. Hell, we can do what we like, lambdas are just objects like anything else. This is closure.
Those two properties, together, are incredibly powerful. It's fantastically easy to make abstractions that are simply impossible in a language without them, unless you're prepared to put up with lots of boilerplate and obfuscation.
Honestly, before I met this fellow, I was wedded to OOP. Now I'm not so sure. I can do OOP with lambdas, but the other way round? Messy, very messy.
You can't do lambda calculus in Python. I tried, it gave me idiotic syntax errors. Something about the lambda keyword being a crippled piece of shit.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The plough.
That's what started it all.
Oh, Sticky Keys. The phrase fills me with dread.
Many Windows features have traumatised me, but none have affected me quite so much as Sticky Keys. Even now, years after I last used XP for any serious amount of time, I'm still mortally afraid of the shift key. I sort of tiptoe daintily around it; my rational self is saying "you're on Linux, it's fine," but underneath, there's the fear, the pure animal fear echoing through me, "beware the Sticky Keys!!!"
Yes, I know who the Luddites were originally. Who are the Luddites now, though?
In the US, it was all about "mercury based preservatives" causing untold woe and suffering.
In the UK, it was all "oh it'll give you autism."
Both claims were basically specious, and they were both cut from the same cloth -- luddism. There is, and has been since pretty much their inception, a staunch group of idiots that want to do away with vaccines, God only knows why.
I'm beyond cynical when it comes to the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies ("social anxiety," anyone?), but you're basically invoking a conspiracy theory in an attempt to discredit epidemiology. If you're going to attack a fundamentally sound discipline, you're going to have to do better than misunderstandings of chemistry and "oh, that nasty Big Pharma wants to kill you" rhetoric.
Yes, because the bar has been set so low, on paper these acts could be used to effect total speech gridlock. Find the words of your boss telling you to work insulting? Bang the fucker up. Disturbed by that billboard you see on your way to work every day? Take 'em down. And so on and so forth, etc etc.
Nobody seems to have really grokked the implications of these laws yet (well, apart from arms companies and what have you), so they haven't really been tested. Who knows how the courts will handle something like that. Would be interesting.
I think the main problem here is not looking where you're pissing!
It's odd that they're still using the Public Order Act 1986, when the Protection From Harassment Act 1997 or Serious Organised Crime and Policing Act 2005 pretty much give the authorities carte blanche to silence protest. One would have thought the police would have realised the amount of power they actually have now.
The Protection from Harassment Act allows the Crown to prosecute anyone causing a person "alarm or distress" if this involves "conduct on at least two occasions." Conduct, it tells us, "includes speech"(5). Under this law, in other words, it is not necessary to demonstrate "threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour" to secure a prosecution. ... the first three people prosecuted were all peaceful protesters. It is now used routinely against non-violent animal rights protesters and people demonstrating peacefully outside military bases and at arms fairs.
...
The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act would have been even more useful. Buried in the middle of this enormous piece of legislation, and missed by every MP who debated the bill, is a section on "harassment intended to deter lawful activities". Under this act, the definition of a "course of conduct" is broadened to include causing alarm or distress to "two or more persons"(6). In other words, Green would only have had to approach two revellers once to have fallen under suspicion of breaching the act. It appears to have been deliberately designed to criminalise protest. "Harassment" now involves seeking "to persuade any person ... not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or to do something that he is not under any obligation to do."(7) Again, there is no defence for peaceful protest.
Some nutty environmentalist.
100 years war?
* Whooooosh *
I think the lesson we can draw from this is that it's fantastically easy to make bad user interfaces. The truly horrific thing in this case is that there is no support email that I can find, you have to do support requests on their forum, which is broken, too.
It's a shame, really, because I was rather enjoying it.
What, Suger, the 11th Century monk who wrote about Louis VI and VII? How is that relevant?
Don't worry, I was already leaving...
OK, so the password works for the site, but if I try to post my problem (above), I get another "access denied" page.
The "beta" tag, in this case, really is there for a reason.
OK, so I gave FoldIt a go (it's at fold.it). It's based on the idea of using lots of people to do protein folding rather than automating it or giving the task to phDs. The main gameplay elements are two buttons, "shake" and "wiggle." You basically just move the strands around randomly, then push those two buttons until you hit an acceptable score. Maybe there's more depth to it, but that's about all I could surmise.
Still pretty fun though, and it runs in Wine.
My one piece of advice: make sure the password for the site account doesn't have any funny characters in it. It will say "yeah, sure, that's a fine password" when you register, but if you ever try to use it it will tell you it's wrong, and the password recovery process is utterly broken. You are given a single-use login token, which claims that it's directing you to a page where you can set up a new password, but all you'll ever be taken to is an "access denied" page. So standard web interface stuff, I suppose. *sigh*
By what definition? How about The Open Source definition? They did kind of coin the term, after all. In which case you're wrong.
I'm not so sure myself. Could it be that that chips are getting really cheap, as per Moore's Law? So cheap that a piece of software on it significantly affects the price? That there was another option did give these hardware chaps another option, so you're right in that respect.
Was their reason for considering such an option driven by other factors, though? Potentially hardware? I'm unable to say myself.