I liked the article. It helped a geek like me to get in touch with the kind of power technology has as a way to achieve *something else*, as opposed to simply being something cool and interesting in itself. Sometimes it's nice to feel the perspective of the outer world on matters of the inner world. Now, I just gotta go find something new to play with...
I'm too young for Just Bricks packages: I was bred on Lego Castle and Lego Space (of which I believe Star Wars Lego is the true descendant). I even had the chance of a shortlived flirtation with Exoforce: even though I've always loved big robots I let it go quite soon...:)
If you like Lego bricks why not use some true Legos? Far funnier, plus nothing beats Star Wars Legos. Few kids could ever afford that *amazingly cool* 400 bucks new Death Star!!!:D
Plus the equation editor since Word 2007 supports Tex-style typesetting of equations. It's a major difference from the ancient and mouse-heavy Equation Editor...
I have written my BS CS thesis in Word 2007 (plus a few articles) and all were equation heavy. Also, I noticed that most scientific journals have a Word template.
Since it is possible (without limitation) to use Word in a scientific context, some people in my department use it. I'd say the Word vs Tex ratio is something about 50/50: a matter of choice...
Yes it is. Turing equivalent is a device that can compute exactly the same functions as a Turing complete device. As expected per the Church-Turing thesis, all Turing complete devices found today are also Turing equivalent:)
There is a difference between "being *the* simplest form of functional programming" and "being *some* shitty form of imperative programming". This difference is key in understanding why people tend to do amazing things with Excel...
I would recommend Excel to people who can't do programming, can't be bothered with learning but have some sort of automation needs that subtly change relatively often.
Oh teh noes wait! It's all because of Micro$uckz and their evil empire!!!! All inhabitants of planet Earth have been turned into mindless idiots, and only the purest intelligence (only found here on/.) can rescue all!
It's unsound if it does not cite specific data, hardware configuration, and in general anything that would make it possible for me (or anybody else) to restore the initial conditions of that experiment and repeat it with the same results. Repeating experiments with the same outcome is the cornerstone of scientific knowledge.
Anyway, this pissing match might get boring soon: I really do not wish you any harm or insult, and yet you seem to have labelled me as "hostile"...
Excel is a pure, effect-free functional language. It is also Turing-equivalent. It is not *just* statistical software: it is a programming language, related on one hand to other similar languages like SQL and on the other to beasts of Haskell and OCaML caliber.
See also http://www.bestechvideos.com/2009/03/16/taming-effects-with-functional-programming for more...
Man, learn to read. I almost made it to not dignifying your post with a reply, but my fingers were too itchy...
Look, all I'm saying is that my experience with the drivers that come *inside* MS OSes after Windows XP is excellent. I am not passing *any* kind of judgement on those OSes. I have provided detailed information so that my claims could be confirmed or disproved. I felt it appropriate to do so since some guys above kept comparing *nix OSes from a week ago to MS OSes from a decade ago, and those comparisons felt a bit unsound.
You may draw your own conclusions, but I myself will not. I don't care about conclusions and/or judgements: I only care about experiments. This weekend I will start a new set of experiments on Ubuntu, since many people have recommended it to me. If I can achieve the same performance for my work with Ubuntu and, say, nVidia CUDA or OpenCL (which I have studied for this exact purpose) then I will keep using it. If not, I will try again in a few months/years.
Vaio, working flawlessly, all drivers present. Your anecdotal evidence vs my actual experiment(s).
I am training to be a scientist, so I value experiments. If you do too, try: my hardware is a vaio laptop, model vgn-fz18m. Since here on/. girlfriends' hardware counts too, here we go: on a vgn-ar51e the experience is exactly the same as on my laptop.
Now, compare the exactness of my description with the precision of yours:
* "little to no"
* "common hardware"
Heck, a bit more documentation won't hurt at all...
Actually, the same was true for Window$ V*$t* too. I'd rather avoid mentioning the "V" word here on Slashdot for obvious reasons, and even in doing so I'll hide it with '$' signs:P
Win V's setup took quite longer than Win 7, the wireless drivers were installed but my home network had to be connected to after the end of the installation and everything was a bit less immediate and smooth. I could easily chose not to install any of the Sony drivers and/or utilities, and all my hardware would work fine. And by fine I mean "stressed to the limit with continuous game development", which equals making errors, accessing the video/audio device drivers with wrong parameters, Visual Studio + the developed graphics applications always open, and so on.
I very recently installed Windows 7 RC1 on my Vaio (vgn-fz18m). Every single device worked flawlessly from the very beginning, with the exception of the wireless card. That actually started working from *before* the beginning, towards the 2nd half of the setup (after some 15 minutes after the instertion of the dvd) when it asked me which of the available wireless networks I wanted to connect to.
After less than half an hour I started installing Visual Studio, F#, XNA and the DirectX 10 SDK. Within 3 hours I had a perfectly working system and I could work at my F# to HLSL compiler (my MD thesis) with Visual Studio on my external monitor while listening to Vivaldi's "4 stagioni". No codecs or video driver or anything else beyond what is written on this post was installed...
I can't really speak for Ubuntu (I failed miserably at installing it in Virtual PC, though I will try again next weekend a serious dual boot) but whoever bases their comparisons on Windows XP are basically comparing apples to oranges: 9 years in the CS industry change a shitload of things!
There you go. I just installed Windows 7 on a vaio vgn-fz18m, and all the hardware just worked. nVidia accelerated driver, wifi (my wireless network was detected *before* the windows setup even finished), sound, multiple monitors, every single thing. Then I installed Yod'm 3d (I like cubes and multiple desktops) and could proceed to install Visual Studio 2008 + F# + DirectX 10 + XNA to keep working on my MD thesis. All in less than 4 hours...
Come on guys, talking about XP nowadays is quite an omission!
As a tutor in a CS university, I have just finished helping my teachers manage an introductory programming course in functional languages. They figured (I wholeheartedly agree) that functional programming is a great way to get started, because it is high level and it forces you to think about coding instead of "coding now, thinking (maybe) later". They were thinking about using Scala, but then I suggested F# so that we could use some.Net library for making games (like XNA) to create more engaging assignments.
I also believe the amazingly strong link between functional programming and logic makes FP a subject that might be of a more general use to high school students than traditional imperative programming with its weaker ties with maths and logic in general.
Slashdot Mirror
This comment is "troll", while "Silverlight is awful. I hope it dies a quick death soon" is "informative"? /. is becoming a pile of shit.
I apologize if it is not the case, but this (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165528(VS.80).aspx) looks like a nice enough list. I suppose any other desired behavior can be added.
I liked the article. It helped a geek like me to get in touch with the kind of power technology has as a way to achieve *something else*, as opposed to simply being something cool and interesting in itself. Sometimes it's nice to feel the perspective of the outer world on matters of the inner world. Now, I just gotta go find something new to play with...
for the same 2 parties that is. (and in my opinion, 2 parties is not enough to make it a democracy)
Then come to Italy, and enjoy the great freedom that only more than 100 parties can offer! :)
I'm too young for Just Bricks packages: I was bred on Lego Castle and Lego Space (of which I believe Star Wars Lego is the true descendant). I even had the chance of a shortlived flirtation with Exoforce: even though I've always loved big robots I let it go quite soon... :)
If you like Lego bricks why not use some true Legos? Far funnier, plus nothing beats Star Wars Legos. Few kids could ever afford that *amazingly cool* 400 bucks new Death Star!!! :D
Word 2007 has an equation editor that supports most of the equation syntax found in LaTex, with some minor differences. Just hit ALT + = ...
Plus the equation editor since Word 2007 supports Tex-style typesetting of equations. It's a major difference from the ancient and mouse-heavy Equation Editor... I have written my BS CS thesis in Word 2007 (plus a few articles) and all were equation heavy. Also, I noticed that most scientific journals have a Word template. Since it is possible (without limitation) to use Word in a scientific context, some people in my department use it. I'd say the Word vs Tex ratio is something about 50/50: a matter of choice...
Yes it is. Turing equivalent is a device that can compute exactly the same functions as a Turing complete device. As expected per the Church-Turing thesis, all Turing complete devices found today are also Turing equivalent :)
There is a difference between "being *the* simplest form of functional programming" and "being *some* shitty form of imperative programming". This difference is key in understanding why people tend to do amazing things with Excel... I would recommend Excel to people who can't do programming, can't be bothered with learning but have some sort of automation needs that subtly change relatively often. Oh teh noes wait! It's all because of Micro$uckz and their evil empire!!!! All inhabitants of planet Earth have been turned into mindless idiots, and only the purest intelligence (only found here on /.) can rescue all!
It's unsound if it does not cite specific data, hardware configuration, and in general anything that would make it possible for me (or anybody else) to restore the initial conditions of that experiment and repeat it with the same results. Repeating experiments with the same outcome is the cornerstone of scientific knowledge. Anyway, this pissing match might get boring soon: I really do not wish you any harm or insult, and yet you seem to have labelled me as "hostile"...
Excel is a pure, effect-free functional language. It is also Turing-equivalent. It is not *just* statistical software: it is a programming language, related on one hand to other similar languages like SQL and on the other to beasts of Haskell and OCaML caliber. See also http://www.bestechvideos.com/2009/03/16/taming-effects-with-functional-programming for more...
Man, learn to read. I almost made it to not dignifying your post with a reply, but my fingers were too itchy... Look, all I'm saying is that my experience with the drivers that come *inside* MS OSes after Windows XP is excellent. I am not passing *any* kind of judgement on those OSes. I have provided detailed information so that my claims could be confirmed or disproved. I felt it appropriate to do so since some guys above kept comparing *nix OSes from a week ago to MS OSes from a decade ago, and those comparisons felt a bit unsound. You may draw your own conclusions, but I myself will not. I don't care about conclusions and/or judgements: I only care about experiments. This weekend I will start a new set of experiments on Ubuntu, since many people have recommended it to me. If I can achieve the same performance for my work with Ubuntu and, say, nVidia CUDA or OpenCL (which I have studied for this exact purpose) then I will keep using it. If not, I will try again in a few months/years.
Vaio, working flawlessly, all drivers present. Your anecdotal evidence vs my actual experiment(s). I am training to be a scientist, so I value experiments. If you do too, try: my hardware is a vaio laptop, model vgn-fz18m. Since here on /. girlfriends' hardware counts too, here we go: on a vgn-ar51e the experience is exactly the same as on my laptop.
Now, compare the exactness of my description with the precision of yours:
* "little to no"
* "common hardware"
Heck, a bit more documentation won't hurt at all...
Actually, the same was true for Window$ V*$t* too. I'd rather avoid mentioning the "V" word here on Slashdot for obvious reasons, and even in doing so I'll hide it with '$' signs :P
Win V's setup took quite longer than Win 7, the wireless drivers were installed but my home network had to be connected to after the end of the installation and everything was a bit less immediate and smooth. I could easily chose not to install any of the Sony drivers and/or utilities, and all my hardware would work fine. And by fine I mean "stressed to the limit with continuous game development", which equals making errors, accessing the video/audio device drivers with wrong parameters, Visual Studio + the developed graphics applications always open, and so on.
I very recently installed Windows 7 RC1 on my Vaio (vgn-fz18m). Every single device worked flawlessly from the very beginning, with the exception of the wireless card. That actually started working from *before* the beginning, towards the 2nd half of the setup (after some 15 minutes after the instertion of the dvd) when it asked me which of the available wireless networks I wanted to connect to.
After less than half an hour I started installing Visual Studio, F#, XNA and the DirectX 10 SDK. Within 3 hours I had a perfectly working system and I could work at my F# to HLSL compiler (my MD thesis) with Visual Studio on my external monitor while listening to Vivaldi's "4 stagioni". No codecs or video driver or anything else beyond what is written on this post was installed...
I can't really speak for Ubuntu (I failed miserably at installing it in Virtual PC, though I will try again next weekend a serious dual boot) but whoever bases their comparisons on Windows XP are basically comparing apples to oranges: 9 years in the CS industry change a shitload of things!
There you go. I just installed Windows 7 on a vaio vgn-fz18m, and all the hardware just worked. nVidia accelerated driver, wifi (my wireless network was detected *before* the windows setup even finished), sound, multiple monitors, every single thing. Then I installed Yod'm 3d (I like cubes and multiple desktops) and could proceed to install Visual Studio 2008 + F# + DirectX 10 + XNA to keep working on my MD thesis. All in less than 4 hours... Come on guys, talking about XP nowadays is quite an omission!
As a tutor in a CS university, I have just finished helping my teachers manage an introductory programming course in functional languages. They figured (I wholeheartedly agree) that functional programming is a great way to get started, because it is high level and it forces you to think about coding instead of "coding now, thinking (maybe) later". They were thinking about using Scala, but then I suggested F# so that we could use some .Net library for making games (like XNA) to create more engaging assignments.
I also believe the amazingly strong link between functional programming and logic makes FP a subject that might be of a more general use to high school students than traditional imperative programming with its weaker ties with maths and logic in general.