Only having read the abstract, and the linked article, I don't really see how this is different from the "2 Armed Bandit" theory which John Holland Laid out 40 years ago in "Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems". Holland laid out how the combination of sexual reproduction with mutation within a population otpimises search across the space by combining exploitation of good areas of the search space with exploration to find better areas.
Actually, my original post was not really meant as a Rubyista fanboi statement - I have worked with a whole host of languages over the past 30 years (Is it that long!!)
15 years ago when I first discovered Ruby, I used it for scripting data handling from C++ simulations, and then for sketching out ideas on large scale telecoms simulations which were then implemented "properly" in C++. I now can't remember when I last coded in C++ - I use Ruby pretty much everywhere (with the C API where I need real speed and low level interfacing to hardware.
I guess the point is that things move on and times change. C++ hit the spot in the late 80s and early 90s as it combined Object Orientation with compiled speed. But processors are much faster now and memory is cheaper. So dynamic languages like Ruby and Pythoon become more attractive, as (amongst other things) they are optimized for programmer effort. I have no doubt that they will be eclipsed in their turn by newer and better languages. Particular issues are around concurrency (putting multi-threading across multiple cores) and (for Ruby at least, as has been pointed out) library dependency handling.
If we can see further, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Bjarne Stroustrop is one of those giants, and we should be grateful for his efforts, and those of his colleagues on the C++ committees.
Absolutely agree - but in my case my preferred poison is Ruby rather than Java. I am using it on embedded systems because these days, it is fast enough on a modern embedded controller of the RPi variety.
GSM and 3G phones listen to the cell tower's Pilot carrier, which contains a whole bunch of data (which network, neighbouring cells etc). thenetwork will broadcast a request for a particular phone to contact it when there is incoming traffic (eg call or SMS) for that phone.
To reduce the volume of traffic, it only broadcasts this request over a small(ish) no of cells, called a Location Area (LA). And how does it know which LA to poll - because part of the broadcast data on the pilot channel is the LA identifier - so when a phone switches from listening on one cell to listening on another (which it doesn't inform the network about unless it is mid call) it checks the LA number, and then updates the network with it's new LA when the LA identification changes.
So if anyone on the plane left their mobile switched on (and with a couple of hundred people on the plane this is a racing certainty), then by checking the operater records for all the phones, LA updates will be there (and yes, operators are required to keep this meta-data for the intelligence services).
In consequence, I would be extremely surprised if the NSA / GCHQ / KGB and Chinese Military Intelligence did not already have a good indication off where the plane was (or was not).
As executor of a will you have to get probate, which means that a court has to confirm that 1. The will is valid 2. You are appointed as executor of the estate by the will 3. You are a fit and proper person to be appointed as an executor (eg no convictions for fraud, etc)
This is (in most cases) a rubber stamp - you send off the documents, and an official letter (the Grant of Probate) comes back from the court a few weeeks later.
Until you have this, you have no legal standing. Once you have this, you have the right to dispose of the estate as per the will. Any organisation will ask to see the Grant of Probate, and will refuse to deal with you until you have this.
This sounds very like the existing 3G soft handover feature.
I'm not involved in that area of telecoms these days, but I do recall that the network equipment manufacturers were finding it very difficult to get working, and requiring some serious compute power.
I don't think I have missed the point. The question is whether MS is willing to trade existing market share on Office for the opportunity to gain market share by buying into the next big thing, by helping create the conditions where the next big thing is helpful to them.
Although I guess your question has made me get to the root of my thoughts:-)
Personally, i find the MS response to the OpenDocument format quite interesting, and I think it is rather short sighted.
MS currently seems to be going through a phase where it is lacking innovation and agility, and is trying to buy these concepts (see for example their aquisition of Groove).
By adopting the OpenDocument format, MS would make it a lot easier for 3rd parties to create applications that interwork easily with MS Office documents, in all sorts of ways that they don't at the moment. For example, MS Equation Editor is a dog, so even though at work I have to use Offie, I do all my equation editing in OpenOffice, because the equation editor is much nicer.
If there is a sea of 3rd party vendors offering applications which extend the functionality of MS Office (by working directly with OpenDocument files), then there is an awful lot of scope for MS to aquire the best of them - and MS has awfully deep pockets.
Nah, but every time someone uses a lift they need their RFID tagged pass, so you can get patterns of movement of how people move round the resort.
Of course, you are right that people should use their brains and eyes once in a while, but please remember taht this is management we are talking about!
Fair. As I ski off-piste a lot I just go for my trusty Ortovox (Avalanche blipper), shovel and probe. But I have to say that RFID ski passes are very useful as you don't have to get your pass out of your pocket to get on the lift.
I can also see them being very useful for the resort management to analyse patterns of movement on slopes. OK, a lot of it isn't rocket science, but I really hate resorts where all the runs descend into the beginners area - it just seems so unfair on those trying to learn (Are you listening Grand Serre Chevalier, hats off to Isolla, and some other smaller resorts which I don't want to mention because I don't want them full of slashdotters).
OK, a couple of things that should be cleared up here (as a Rubyist of 4 years standing)
VMs are different strokes for different folks. yes, the.NET VM (and the Mono VM) are very fine pieces of work. But they are designed for statically typed languages. Perl, Python and Ruby are all dynamically typed, and the Parrot VM is specifically designed for dynamically typed languages.
Continuations are really rather spiffy useful things. Take a look round comp.lang.ruby at some point, there is a very good (and amusing) explanation of how you might wish to use one here
But of course there is a difference between BMW and Audis. I'd buy a second hand Audi, but a second hand Beamer has probably been razzed to fuck by some twat from marketing who has watched Ronin too often:-)
beware of Geeks bearing Gifts....
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 1
The Linux Source Code was left as an offering to the Gods by the Geeks at the end of the 10 year siege of the city of Redmond. There were many in the city who welcomed such a gift and wished to throw open their souce and bring the Linux Source Code within their walls.
But Ballmeroon, high priest of Redmond, was not convinced, and foresaw great evil. "I do not trust Geeks bearing Gifts" he cried, and threw his spear of IP infringement at the Source Code, crying "Developers developers developers developers!".
But he was devoured by a giant penguin which came from across the sea. The people of Redmond then thre open their source and welcomed the Linux Source Code into Redmond.
And the rest is history (and a rather poor film starring Brad Pitt in a skirt)...
Do you not think that now is exasctly the right time to start worrying about a gGUI. If Parrot is running basic, then the guts of a VM is obviously there. SO maybe now is the right time to think about low-level bindings to GUIs, etc. After all, the efforts are already strted to put Perl, Python and Ruby onto Parrot, so why not a good common interface to Qt4.
You can probably tell that I am more awake than I was when I wrote my original comment:-)
Yes. I was sitting there with a cup of coffee thingking API no A something no ahh fuckit!
Ta!
Treefrog
Qt interface to Parrot?
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A Qt widget set target against the Parrot virtual machine would be lovely.
Just think..Net has well, all that Windows stuff (I'm not a big windows graphics programmer)
Java has Swing / Eclipse and the old one whose name I can't remember but I did use it a lot but its 7:30am and the coffee hasn't hit me yet.
A Parrot/Qt set would give Perl, Python, Ruby etc a nice graphics toolkit targettable against multiple platforms. Yes I know about Tk/Tcl and WxWindows.
Slashdot Mirror
Only having read the abstract, and the linked article, I don't really see how this is different from the "2 Armed Bandit" theory which John Holland Laid out 40 years ago in "Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems". Holland laid out how the combination of sexual reproduction with mutation within a population otpimises search across the space by combining exploitation of good areas of the search space with exploration to find better areas.
Can someone more up to date enlighten me?
kind regards
tree frog
True in many respects :-)
Actually, my original post was not really meant as a Rubyista fanboi statement - I have worked with a whole host of languages over the past 30 years (Is it that long!!)
15 years ago when I first discovered Ruby, I used it for scripting data handling from C++ simulations, and then for sketching out ideas on large scale telecoms simulations which were then implemented "properly" in C++. I now can't remember when I last coded in C++ - I use Ruby pretty much everywhere (with the C API where I need real speed and low level interfacing to hardware.
I guess the point is that things move on and times change. C++ hit the spot in the late 80s and early 90s as it combined Object Orientation with compiled speed. But processors are much faster now and memory is cheaper. So dynamic languages like Ruby and Pythoon become more attractive, as (amongst other things) they are optimized for programmer effort. I have no doubt that they will be eclipsed in their turn by newer and better languages. Particular issues are around concurrency (putting multi-threading across multiple cores) and (for Ruby at least, as has been pointed out) library dependency handling.
If we can see further, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Bjarne Stroustrop is one of those giants, and we should be grateful for his efforts, and those of his colleagues on the C++ committees.
Absolutely agree - but in my case my preferred poison is Ruby rather than Java. I am using it on embedded systems because these days, it is fast enough on a modern embedded controller of the RPi variety.
Will they be bringing Johnny Marr in to calibrate it?
Not completely correct, but on the right lines...
GSM and 3G phones listen to the cell tower's Pilot carrier, which contains a whole bunch of data (which network, neighbouring cells etc). thenetwork will broadcast a request for a particular phone to contact it when there is incoming traffic (eg call or SMS) for that phone.
To reduce the volume of traffic, it only broadcasts this request over a small(ish) no of cells, called a Location Area (LA). And how does it know which LA to poll - because part of the broadcast data on the pilot channel is the LA identifier - so when a phone switches from listening on one cell to listening on another (which it doesn't inform the network about unless it is mid call) it checks the LA number, and then updates the network with it's new LA when the LA identification changes.
So if anyone on the plane left their mobile switched on (and with a couple of hundred people on the plane this is a racing certainty), then by checking the operater records for all the phones, LA updates will be there (and yes, operators are required to keep this meta-data for the intelligence services).
In consequence, I would be extremely surprised if the NSA / GCHQ / KGB and Chinese Military Intelligence did not already have a good indication off where the plane was (or was not).
Probate is a standard part of English Law
This is exactly correct.
As executor of a will you have to get probate, which means that a court has to confirm that
1. The will is valid
2. You are appointed as executor of the estate by the will
3. You are a fit and proper person to be appointed as an executor (eg no convictions for fraud, etc)
This is (in most cases) a rubber stamp - you send off the documents, and an official letter (the Grant of Probate) comes back from the court a few weeeks later.
Until you have this, you have no legal standing. Once you have this, you have the right to dispose of the estate as per the will. Any organisation will ask to see the Grant of Probate, and will refuse to deal with you until you have this.
This sounds very like the existing 3G soft handover feature.
I'm not involved in that area of telecoms these days, but I do recall that the network equipment manufacturers were finding it very difficult to get working, and requiring some serious compute power.
Imagine the Hunter S Thompson of tech journalism....
regards, treefrog
And what makes you think that phone network software isn't peer reviewed?
regards,
treefrog
I don't think I have missed the point. The question is whether MS is willing to trade existing market share on Office for the opportunity to gain market share by buying into the next big thing, by helping create the conditions where the next big thing is helpful to them.
:-)
Although I guess your question has made me get to the root of my thoughts
Best regards, treefrog
Personally, i find the MS response to the OpenDocument format quite interesting, and I think it is rather short sighted.
MS currently seems to be going through a phase where it is lacking innovation and agility, and is trying to buy these concepts (see for example their aquisition of Groove).
By adopting the OpenDocument format, MS would make it a lot easier for 3rd parties to create applications that interwork easily with MS Office documents, in all sorts of ways that they don't at the moment. For example, MS Equation Editor is a dog, so even though at work I have to use Offie, I do all my equation editing in OpenOffice, because the equation editor is much nicer.
If there is a sea of 3rd party vendors offering applications which extend the functionality of MS Office (by working directly with OpenDocument files), then there is an awful lot of scope for MS to aquire the best of them - and MS has awfully deep pockets.
So is MS missing a trick here?
Best regards,
treefrog
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke
Oh, and I'm mainly talking about European resorts. But the US ones don't look much better!
Treefrog
Nah, but every time someone uses a lift they need their RFID tagged pass, so you can get patterns of movement of how people move round the resort.
Of course, you are right that people should use their brains and eyes once in a while, but please remember taht this is management we are talking about!
regards,
treefrog
I can also see them being very useful for the resort management to analyse patterns of movement on slopes. OK, a lot of it isn't rocket science, but I really hate resorts where all the runs descend into the beginners area - it just seems so unfair on those trying to learn (Are you listening Grand Serre Chevalier, hats off to Isolla, and some other smaller resorts which I don't want to mention because I don't want them full of slashdotters).
regards,
treefrog
- VMs are different strokes for different folks. yes, the
.NET VM (and the Mono VM) are very fine pieces of work. But they are designed for statically typed languages. Perl, Python and Ruby are all dynamically typed, and the Parrot VM is specifically designed for dynamically typed languages.
- Continuations are really rather spiffy useful things. Take a look round comp.lang.ruby at some point, there is a very good (and amusing) explanation of how you might wish to use one here
Best regards,treefrog
Most of these have RFI tags in them. Seems like a good idea to me, for fairly ovious reasons.
Regards,
treefrog
But of course there is a difference between BMW and Audis. I'd buy a second hand Audi, but a second hand Beamer has probably been razzed to fuck by some twat from marketing who has watched Ronin too often :-)
Treefrog
I was told that I couldn't take a climbing rope in hand lugage (not metal stuff, just a rope).
What am I going to do? Tie everyone up?
regards, treefrog
regards, treefrog
But Ballmeroon, high priest of Redmond, was not convinced, and foresaw great evil. "I do not trust Geeks bearing Gifts" he cried, and threw his spear of IP infringement at the Source Code, crying "Developers developers developers developers!".
But he was devoured by a giant penguin which came from across the sea. The people of Redmond then thre open their source and welcomed the Linux Source Code into Redmond.
And the rest is history (and a rather poor film starring Brad Pitt in a skirt)...
regards, treefrog
Do you not think that now is exasctly the right time to start worrying about a gGUI. If Parrot is running basic, then the guts of a VM is obviously there. SO maybe now is the right time to think about low-level bindings to GUIs, etc. After all, the efforts are already strted to put Perl, Python and Ruby onto Parrot, so why not a good common interface to Qt4.
:-)
You can probably tell that I am more awake than I was when I wrote my original comment
regards,
Treefrog
Yes.
I was sitting there with a cup of coffee thingking API no A something no ahh fuckit!
Ta!
Treefrog
A Qt widget set target against the Parrot virtual machine would be lovely.
.Net has well, all that Windows stuff (I'm not a big windows graphics programmer)
Just think.
Java has Swing / Eclipse and the old one whose name I can't remember but I did use it a lot but its 7:30am and the coffee hasn't hit me yet.
A Parrot/Qt set would give Perl, Python, Ruby etc a nice graphics toolkit targettable against multiple platforms. Yes I know about Tk/Tcl and WxWindows.
Uurgh. Must get coffee. And train
regards, treefrog