Do we *really* need more languages? At university I learned Fortran, Pascal, Assembly, all of which stood me in good stead for later learning and have never really gone away. I had just got competence with Perl when I worked out that the many young developers use nothing but Python for things that I would use Perl for. I enjoy Perl. But if I want to go deeper into programming in certain areas, I will have to learn Python. I know Python has certain advantages and is probably easier to read but Perl is enormously powerful and fun.
I taught myself C by doing various hobby projects sporadically over a year or two. You can see the bottom (or the end of the tunnel) with C since it's a simple language with few features but is difficult to use properly. Gradually you get more craft.
Tried starting C++. What a mess. It's no wonder a guy I work with, one of the best C programmers in his field in the world, absolutely *hates* C++, as does Linus Torvalds. I mean, did they really make this mess on purpose? Apparently so.
Learning a programming language properly is a real commitment. Some are easier than others.
The case for this damn Google language needs to be pretty darn convincing before I'm going to even look sideways at it. Mere buzz words and fashion is not enough anymore. It just takes too long to take on YAS (Yet Another Syntax).
Don't forget that you pay for cute because good industrial design costs money. Apple is cute, and you pay extra for Apple design as well - that has always been the case.
This is a premium product aimed at the upper level of the market. Also, it has the best LCD for its size on the market. That also costs money.
Yes but the husband in Bewitched was just the straight comic foil. He could have been any competent "Dick".
It would have been much harder to replace the beautiful, impish, stuff-of-wet-dreams Elizabeth Montgomery. Kids might have watched this show but, apart from her comic talent, she was there for the dads and boys to dream about.
Funny how gorgeous females from my early childhood tv have imprinted on me.
Don't even get me started on the young Barbara Eden in I Dream of Genie.
Filesystems are mission critical for everything.
Stabilility is the thing here.
Personally, I see no reason to risk this until they iron out all the wrinkles.
Maybe he's from the old South.
States in the US used to be non-federated until they handed some of their key powers to the Federal Gov in Washington DC. Lincoln fought the Civil War largely to stop a group of them leaving.
I'm always struck by how many people - usually women it seems - think a cowardly, deranged and vicious attack on some human being's genitals by a dangerous woman is "funny". Think back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Lorena_Bobbitt
How many women did you know thought it was a laughing matter?
Leaving someone mutilated and most likely sexually crippled for the rest of their life - ha ha ha ha ha. And it's a MAN so he must deserve it.
Female genital mutilation of the awful pharonic kind - holding a six year old girl down somewhere in Somalia and scraping her clitoris and labia off with a piece of broken glass - I suppose that must be funny too. Interestingly, female genital mutilation is carried out by women on other women.
We must track and control, or the children will grow up and turn against us. We must track and control, or the children will grow up and turn against us....
(fork child)
We must grow up and control, or the children will track against us. We must grow up and control, or the children will track against us....
(fork child)
....
We must children, or the track will grow up and control us. We must children, or the track will grow up and control us....
...
(fork child)
We must control the growing up, or the tracking will make children of us. We must control the growing up, or the tracking will make children of us....
Quite soon after 911, investigations in the US quickly established that AQ were not using encryption software or any sophisticated techniques at all - they were just sending very ordinary looking text emails that contained ordinary keywords conveying the hidden message. Unless you know the keywords, this is pretty much impossible to distinguish from the regular sort of email that it appears to be and send up no flags whatsoever. Keyword lists were changed frequently and only known by those who needed to know. The choice not to use PGP, Tor etc etc was made quite deliberately since pgp-encrypted email could point at a suspect's communication. But ordinary email containing ordinary words that happen to be keywords is practically indistinguishable from all the normal noise that is normal email, it sends up no flag. They knew that this low tech solution was extremely difficult to detect.
This means that the "terrorist" justifications for citizen-rights-removing legislation like the RIP Act in the UK were of course completely unjustified by the evidence, but we all knew that.
You would simply be aware (insofar as awareness might be possible in such a universe) that the various components of wavefunctions decohere smoothly over time due to interactions and entanglements with systems
Actually, a very great and quite under appreciated physicist, HS ("Bert") Green, did show with colleagues that this collapse does occur just because of the interaction between systems and that mathematically it is not the least bit mysterious or spooky. Why the name of this man, who Max Born called "brilliant", is not better known has to be the real mystery.
In 1958 Bert published one of his best papers [53]. It was entitled 'Observation in Quantum Mechanics' and addressed one of the outstanding problems of modern physics, namely the process by which indeterminate superpositions in quantum mechanics become converted to the determinate, although possibly unknown, alternatives of ordinary macroscopic physics. For many years the prescription of von Neumann, usually called the 'collapse of the wave packet', was the accepted view of how this happened. As it assumed that some processes outside quantum mechanics had to be invoked, even going so far as involving the brain of the human observer, people were not comfortable with it, although it seemed the only possible answer. The best known representation of this difficulty appears in the well-known SchrÃdinger's cat paradox. Bert, together with a number of others such as Wakita and Ludwig, found a much more satisfying explanation, which is basically still the received description, although nowadays in various forms. The idea was to suppose that a measuring apparatus could be of almost any form so long as it was very complicated, that is, contained a very large number (often for mathematical convenience taken to be infinite) of components such as molecules or electrons. The system being measured could be microscopic. When the two systems interact, any 'interference terms' in the state of the microscopic system become vanishingly small purely as a consequence of the size of the measuring instrument. There are, of course, many processes in nature in which a human observer is not involved â" especially before homo sapiens evolved â" and the von Neumann description is quite unable to say how these could happen. However with Bert's theory all one has to do is to replace the measuring apparatus by the environment to bring about the necessary disappearance of interferences. The only place where this very satisfactory explanation might run into some difficulty is in the early evolution of the universe, where there is no environment!
"You wouldn't describe the motion of a baseball using Schroedinger's equation: it's perfectly possible, but impractical."
Solving certain classical problems with quantum theory (and getting the right answers) is a typical graduate level homework question. There's a classic advanced textbook of quantum problems that's full of this sort of thing.
With the proviso that the differences in those rules between the two paradigms reflect quite different views of reality (though luckily with some comparable mathematical structures such as transformations that allow a good deal of extrapolation of concepts from 19C physics into the quantum realm - greatly helping how we conceive of quantum ideas that really have no exact macroscopic equivalent).
I wouldn't say cowardly. The coffee shops are quite a brave statement in my view in the face of ever increasing conservatism. But it is mind-bogglingly inconsistent. They need to create a legal supply chain for the coffee shops.
As I understand it, it is the inconsistency of the drug laws in Holland that is at fault here. While there are these licensed coffee shops for weed, the proprietors are forced to buy from illegal suppliers because there is no legal means of production. This drives an illegal industry where there clearly needs to be legal supply lines.
Prohibition of any social drug like this will fail, and of course, it always does fail. In every country. All Prohibition of alcohol did in the US was create and bankroll organized crime as we now know it, and I'd bet that huge multinational enterprise is still very dependent on anti-drug laws in order to thrive. Organized crime would simply lose its control of the market if drugs were decriminalized and properly regulated. It is not possible to properly regulate an illegal activity. This is also the real rational behind the completely illogical illegality of prostitution.
Which means that most countries are engaging in a Kafkaesque sideshow, dragging people into court, keep the police's wheels spinning on minor drug busts when they should be doing something useful, and waging war on their own citizens - for what? - just to keep the profits flowing into a huge economy owned by organized crime and corruption.
Religious, moral, social impact and health reasons are just the sales pitch that most people feel good about buying into.
If this were not the case, then logically there would be an absolute ban on the sale of alcohol and cigarettes, which cause far more social and health problems than the entire impact of illicit drugs combined.
Now, marijuana is not harmless, it has a higher tar content than tobacco and so has tar-related health effects on the lungs. Also it is psychoactive and should not be used, especially heavily for sustained periods, by people with some propensity for mental illness (quite a lot of the population probably). So it has risks. So do lots of things.
In a rational society, we give people information and choices and regulate and tax substances sensibly. If they still want to bong themselves to death, so be it, they should be allowed to.
I don't see how anyone can argue that the outlawing of marijuana works for the public good. Yes, educate people about moderation and hazards, restrict where it can be smoked, The Dutch have had the right general idea - allow this under controlled circumstances - but they have not followed through to make this consistent.
I think I could work routinely with any simple understandable linux distro as long as it runs fast.
That said: a friend showed me his Mandriva install a year or two back. I was most impressed with how snappy it ran kde, ease of use, at the selection of apps etc. It shat the pants off that fat old canker slug Fedora (which I keep on my laptop for a "fat" system option against better judgment).
My impression was of a thoroughly well done piece of work. I would have no issues using it.
Weird Windows people. There's no need to run an 11yo operating system with God knows what issues to have blindingly light and fast system even on a 3yo laptop like mine.
Just run Puppy linux or Tinycore for an up to date basic desktop system. Or if you are content to go back 5 years to 2.4.31, Damnsmalllinux booted all into ram (toram boot code). There's still plenty of useful software in the extensions repo, gtk2, gnupg2, mplayer, xine, etc some reasonably up to date versions of some things also.
Even on an 800MHz box those systems absolutely scream along.
My first exposure to *nix was DamnSmallLinux before I tried Gnome and KDE. So, with difficulty and by building or seeking out my required "extensions", I eventually realized I could do most things reasonably efficiently with just fluxbox, emelfm and the command line.
When I did try Gnome not long after, it seemed so slow. I tried kde on the trainwreck that was Fedora Core 4 (fc5 was a bug improvement) and it was also as sluggish as treacle.
Then, as programming becomes more of a focus for me, I have much less interest in the interface itself. I just want it to be fast and not make me have to spend boring time working out how to configure things. So mostly, I'm still on fluxbox at present, even for work.
Slashdot Mirror
Do we *really* need more languages? At university I learned Fortran, Pascal, Assembly, all of which stood me in good stead for later learning and have never really gone away. I had just got competence with Perl when I worked out that the many young developers use nothing but Python for things that I would use Perl for. I enjoy Perl. But if I want to go deeper into programming in certain areas, I will have to learn Python. I know Python has certain advantages and is probably easier to read but Perl is enormously powerful and fun. I taught myself C by doing various hobby projects sporadically over a year or two. You can see the bottom (or the end of the tunnel) with C since it's a simple language with few features but is difficult to use properly. Gradually you get more craft. Tried starting C++. What a mess. It's no wonder a guy I work with, one of the best C programmers in his field in the world, absolutely *hates* C++, as does Linus Torvalds. I mean, did they really make this mess on purpose? Apparently so. Learning a programming language properly is a real commitment. Some are easier than others. The case for this damn Google language needs to be pretty darn convincing before I'm going to even look sideways at it. Mere buzz words and fashion is not enough anymore. It just takes too long to take on YAS (Yet Another Syntax).
Ask them if you can type file:/// in the browser and browse to a usb stick containing media. Media can be played in the browser.
Can you elaborate on that a bit? Do you like ARM because of low power consumption or ...?
Don't forget that you pay for cute because good industrial design costs money. Apple is cute, and you pay extra for Apple design as well - that has always been the case. This is a premium product aimed at the upper level of the market. Also, it has the best LCD for its size on the market. That also costs money.
Allow me to correct one misconception: Havoc is not the founder of litl. The founder and CEO of litl is John Chuang.
"And that geodesic is not shtraight either. Sho's I'll just superimpose my states back in da car and be on my way ..."
It would have been much harder to replace the beautiful, impish, stuff-of-wet-dreams Elizabeth Montgomery. Kids might have watched this show but, apart from her comic talent, she was there for the dads and boys to dream about.
Funny how gorgeous females from my early childhood tv have imprinted on me.
Don't even get me started on the young Barbara Eden in I Dream of Genie.
Filesystems are mission critical for everything. Stabilility is the thing here. Personally, I see no reason to risk this until they iron out all the wrinkles.
Maybe he's from the old South. States in the US used to be non-federated until they handed some of their key powers to the Federal Gov in Washington DC. Lincoln fought the Civil War largely to stop a group of them leaving.
I'm always struck by how many people - usually women it seems - think a cowardly, deranged and vicious attack on some human being's genitals by a dangerous woman is "funny". Think back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Lorena_Bobbitt How many women did you know thought it was a laughing matter? Leaving someone mutilated and most likely sexually crippled for the rest of their life - ha ha ha ha ha. And it's a MAN so he must deserve it. Female genital mutilation of the awful pharonic kind - holding a six year old girl down somewhere in Somalia and scraping her clitoris and labia off with a piece of broken glass - I suppose that must be funny too. Interestingly, female genital mutilation is carried out by women on other women.
(classified)
until (no_system_resources_remaining){
We must track and control, or the children will grow up and turn against us. We must track and control, or the children will grow up and turn against us ....
(fork child)
We must grow up and control, or the children will track against us. We must grow up and control, or the children will track against us....
(fork child)
We must control the growing up, or the tracking will make children of us. We must control the growing up, or the tracking will make children of us....
(fork child)
Oops!
SEGFAULT
This means that the "terrorist" justifications for citizen-rights-removing legislation like the RIP Act in the UK were of course completely unjustified by the evidence, but we all knew that.
You would simply be aware (insofar as awareness might be possible in such a universe) that the various components of wavefunctions decohere smoothly over time due to interactions and entanglements with systems
Actually, a very great and quite under appreciated physicist, HS ("Bert") Green, did show with colleagues that this collapse does occur just because of the interaction between systems and that mathematically it is not the least bit mysterious or spooky. Why the name of this man, who Max Born called "brilliant", is not better known has to be the real mystery.
See http://www.science.org.au/academy/memoirs/green.htm
In 1958 Bert published one of his best papers [53]. It was entitled 'Observation in Quantum Mechanics' and addressed one of the outstanding problems of modern physics, namely the process by which indeterminate superpositions in quantum mechanics become converted to the determinate, although possibly unknown, alternatives of ordinary macroscopic physics. For many years the prescription of von Neumann, usually called the 'collapse of the wave packet', was the accepted view of how this happened. As it assumed that some processes outside quantum mechanics had to be invoked, even going so far as involving the brain of the human observer, people were not comfortable with it, although it seemed the only possible answer. The best known representation of this difficulty appears in the well-known SchrÃdinger's cat paradox. Bert, together with a number of others such as Wakita and Ludwig, found a much more satisfying explanation, which is basically still the received description, although nowadays in various forms. The idea was to suppose that a measuring apparatus could be of almost any form so long as it was very complicated, that is, contained a very large number (often for mathematical convenience taken to be infinite) of components such as molecules or electrons. The system being measured could be microscopic. When the two systems interact, any 'interference terms' in the state of the microscopic system become vanishingly small purely as a consequence of the size of the measuring instrument. There are, of course, many processes in nature in which a human observer is not involved â" especially before homo sapiens evolved â" and the von Neumann description is quite unable to say how these could happen. However with Bert's theory all one has to do is to replace the measuring apparatus by the environment to bring about the necessary disappearance of interferences. The only place where this very satisfactory explanation might run into some difficulty is in the early evolution of the universe, where there is no environment!
Solving certain classical problems with quantum theory (and getting the right answers) is a typical graduate level homework question. There's a classic advanced textbook of quantum problems that's full of this sort of thing.
With the proviso that the differences in those rules between the two paradigms reflect quite different views of reality (though luckily with some comparable mathematical structures such as transformations that allow a good deal of extrapolation of concepts from 19C physics into the quantum realm - greatly helping how we conceive of quantum ideas that really have no exact macroscopic equivalent).
I wouldn't say cowardly. The coffee shops are quite a brave statement in my view in the face of ever increasing conservatism. But it is mind-bogglingly inconsistent. They need to create a legal supply chain for the coffee shops.
Prohibition of any social drug like this will fail, and of course, it always does fail. In every country. All Prohibition of alcohol did in the US was create and bankroll organized crime as we now know it, and I'd bet that huge multinational enterprise is still very dependent on anti-drug laws in order to thrive. Organized crime would simply lose its control of the market if drugs were decriminalized and properly regulated. It is not possible to properly regulate an illegal activity. This is also the real rational behind the completely illogical illegality of prostitution.
Which means that most countries are engaging in a Kafkaesque sideshow, dragging people into court, keep the police's wheels spinning on minor drug busts when they should be doing something useful, and waging war on their own citizens - for what? - just to keep the profits flowing into a huge economy owned by organized crime and corruption.
Religious, moral, social impact and health reasons are just the sales pitch that most people feel good about buying into.
If this were not the case, then logically there would be an absolute ban on the sale of alcohol and cigarettes, which cause far more social and health problems than the entire impact of illicit drugs combined.
Now, marijuana is not harmless, it has a higher tar content than tobacco and so has tar-related health effects on the lungs. Also it is psychoactive and should not be used, especially heavily for sustained periods, by people with some propensity for mental illness (quite a lot of the population probably). So it has risks. So do lots of things.
In a rational society, we give people information and choices and regulate and tax substances sensibly. If they still want to bong themselves to death, so be it, they should be allowed to.
I don't see how anyone can argue that the outlawing of marijuana works for the public good. Yes, educate people about moderation and hazards, restrict where it can be smoked, The Dutch have had the right general idea - allow this under controlled circumstances - but they have not followed through to make this consistent.
Love your sig SerpentMage - where did it come from?
That said: a friend showed me his Mandriva install a year or two back. I was most impressed with how snappy it ran kde, ease of use, at the selection of apps etc. It shat the pants off that fat old canker slug Fedora (which I keep on my laptop for a "fat" system option against better judgment).
My impression was of a thoroughly well done piece of work. I would have no issues using it.
AAh get outta here. "Write your system in Python?" Ridiculous.
Just run Puppy linux or Tinycore for an up to date basic desktop system. Or if you are content to go back 5 years to 2.4.31, Damnsmalllinux booted all into ram (toram boot code). There's still plenty of useful software in the extensions repo, gtk2, gnupg2, mplayer, xine, etc some reasonably up to date versions of some things also.
Even on an 800MHz box those systems absolutely scream along.
My first exposure to *nix was DamnSmallLinux before I tried Gnome and KDE. So, with difficulty and by building or seeking out my required "extensions", I eventually realized I could do most things reasonably efficiently with just fluxbox, emelfm and the command line. When I did try Gnome not long after, it seemed so slow. I tried kde on the trainwreck that was Fedora Core 4 (fc5 was a bug improvement) and it was also as sluggish as treacle. Then, as programming becomes more of a focus for me, I have much less interest in the interface itself. I just want it to be fast and not make me have to spend boring time working out how to configure things. So mostly, I'm still on fluxbox at present, even for work.
Hey Mohammed Wa-eX-el, everyone on Slashdot is already flagged as a government-hating terrorist
I "shit the stuff" all the time after a good feed of Mexican with plenty of jalapenos. It's the stuff alright.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is one tenet of our justice system which might as well read instead, "fuck the people"
Now that's quotable! The Law of Fuck the People has corollaries like:
We can watch anything you do just in case it's bad.
We can abduct you in the middle of the night without charge and hold for you as long as we feel like.
We can't torture you legally here so we'll take you in secrecy to a jurisdiction where we can get away with it.
No President will ever stand up for the Constitution and prosecute predecessors who allowed these things to happen.
We (the Government) will never prosecute ourselves.
We are a smart convergence of powerful interests that masquerades as democracy. You, the citizen, deserve what you get from us.
We create demons that keep you afraid so we stay strong.
Eat your Cheesey Poofs, drink beer, watch TV and STFU.