A side note: I've seem to have commited the sin of misattribution. Waldemar Horwat is not the current driver (or a peer) of the JS module at Mozilla: Brendan Eich (the original author at Netscape) is. Mr. Horwat seems to have been one of the redactors of the ECMA standard, though.
JavaScript is a really nice language. For starters, Waldemar Horwat sure knows his stuff. He seems to give a lot of thought to new features before introducing them (check out the project page) and has managed to write an interpreter that can be configured to accept varying language versions (as in language="JavaScriptXXX"). Then, the whole idea of a prototype-based object-oriented language becoming mainstream should have made the Self team green with envy. It supports very powerful constructs, like dynamically attaching behavior to built-in objects via __prototype.
Besides, JavaScript inconsistencies between browsers is mainly a DOM issue, not a language one. Chromatic should have blamed the browsers, not the language.
The logic is complexity inherent to the application. The null command is the simplest to understand and use, the most reliable of all commands in any imperative language, but it hardly does what you need done. I'm not saying you to get rid of your application logic.
What I'm saying is that in matching impedances between application "objects" (loosely speaking, both the OO- and the Relational variety) and application "effects" (rules, triggers, procedures, methods, whatever that elicits a computation) you should strive for the minimum added complexity. Dispensing with the relational model is one way, automating the marshalling and unmarshalling to/from RDBMSs is another. What I opine is that the second way should be considered seriously, as it might cheaper according to a number of metrics: cost of migration, cost of ownership of heterogeneous front ends (not just front views, but full-fledged front-end actors), etc.
The motto is: neither methodologies nor duct tape are a panacea. But you know which is cheaper.
Let me explain: there is a common misperception of encapsulation being about state when in all truth it is only about logic: if you think of an object as a FSM (a simplifying assumption that holds water most of the time, for reasons having to do with the psychological management of complexity) the number of data bits is proportional to the logarithm of the number of states, but the count of logic branches is proportional to the square of the number of states (that is, the number of transitions).
That's why using an RDBMS is so much simpler than writing business objects: the manipulation is simple, direct, unmediated.
I think it would be best to start investing time in autocoders that encapsulate Java for the RDBMS.
I won't research for you, but if you're interested, the preprints archive at LANL has a lot of relevant theory. Basically, the current research is trying to come with a unified framework for so-called "phase transitions" in stochastic discrete processes. One of the most studied problems is the transition between "easy" and "hard" problems in 3-SAT (three-satisfiability). Brian Hayes has a very readable article about this phenomenon, with references. The authority in this field seems to be Gabriel Istrate.
The emergence of the giant component in random networks is a mature field of research, of course pioneered by Erdös, and with players of the likes of Don Knuth and Doron Zeilberger.
From a mathematical standpoint, Graph Theory per se is not really complicated, what actually is is the asymptotic analysis of stochastic processes.
IMHO, perhaps they are both correct, and it all depends on how you look at it/what you are looking for
What, both Maldacena-Theory and Spin Networks? String theory has written Epicicles all over it. The fact that Ptolemaus' theory was held up as dogma for thirteen hundred years didn't make it any more correct, you know.
Spin Networks are really satisfactory from a, um, shall I say paraphysical
point of view. No space, no time and especially no causality underneath but only relationships! Parmenides revived!
It might be worth perusing the discussion on OSNews. The argument pro revolves around the question of how much is your time worth, as a non-OS programmer. The argument con hinges on various issues of relevance and desirability (as you point out).
Pepper has a lot for it in that it is an editor that strove from the start to be an outstanding GUI editor. As Hekkelman himself tells in the interview, the architecture has a couple of nice features not really found on other editors (except, perhaps, MPW for Classic Mac OS. Witness the long mourning some regulars to the mpw-dev list go through still to this day): journal-based edit log for unlimited replay (as opposed to merely undo), superior rendering, virtual file editing, programmable syntax highligting, etc. Many Open Source text widgets could benefit enormously from importing/integrating Pepper code.
Then again, maybe not. Editors tend to be a notoriously religious bone of contention.
[...] as Dijkstra (RIP) put it, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
He was the quintessential modern programmer. Every one of his writings is a modernist manifesto in itself (cf. Marinetti [1]).
AEsthetic movements strive for that kernel of emptiness present in every stylistic endeavor: Michelangelo spoke famously of sculpture being already present in the block of marble, waiting for him to chop away the excess and liberate it. Futurism saw poetry in the void between the stars as much as in the void between the electrons. Postmodernism vacates the space of global narratives (i.e., myths) and lets the dust of the micro-stories to settle down afterwards (think of minimalism in architecture).
Art is about hacking off the crud, as much as programming is.
Sorry to pick nits, but the name is Amalthea (ah-mal-THEH-ah), it means "the Goddess Amal" (IIRC a Babylonian name for Astarte, the Moon goddess). She was the goat that nursed Jupiter (Zeus, actually) in Mount Ida, and whose horn the baby god pulled with his mighty force while playing with her. That horn is called the Cornucopia, or the Horn of Plenty, after Jupiter, ashamed at his own clumsiness, bestowed that gift on the goat as an apology.
Wait a minute. I thought there were penguins on the Falkland Islands -- a mere hop from Argentina. And aren't there penguins in the southern bits of Chile?
Don't quote me on this, but I think there are penguin colonies as north as Bahia Blanca in the Buenos Aires province (the major indentation in the Atlantic coast of South America). There are colonies in the Valdez peninsula (the silly thingamajig further south, where all the whales and stuff are).
I don't really know about Chile, 'cos I think the prevailing bird in the Southern Pacific coast is the cormorant.
Argentina is a natural place for proper, ecologically sound care and feeding of Linux.
The third world is a good option. Cheap wages, highly educated middle-upper classes, good connections to the I'net. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Uruguay are obvious (and alphabetically sorted!) candidates for hosting OS endeavors.
Imagine what a little donation can do in these countries!
I didn't argue that you didn't have ethics, just that you no longer have a rational basis for having them. In fact, you make my point - the fact that you still have ethics after no longer having any rational basis for them shows that you are in fact acting as if you presuppose the Christian theistic worldview, and do not in fact fully believe what you propound.
Hm, no. I mean yes, I do have a rational basis for adhering to a retributive ethics; I just didn't made it explicit because I thought it was irrelevant. Various attempts at formalizing retributive behavior have been carried out, and it was argued that it makes sense from both a game-theoretic and an evolutionary point of view. And I'm not "acting as if I presuppose the Christian theistic world-view", for the simple fact that I don't believe in it. It is you that interpret my ethics as stemming from a theistic world-view. Your "as-if" betrays your assumption. Besides, how can you possibly know what I "fully believe" or not?
If there is no such thing as good and evil, what possible justification can there be for your sustaining the golden rule? Why *can't* you do something to someone that you don't want done to yourself? After all, there's no good and no evil, right?
Because the golden rule Just Makes Sense (TM). To me, as a human being in a society, doing "bad" ("mean", "evil", whatever; but note: as a quality of my acts, not of my self) things is a waste of energy and time, and an opportunity lost for receiving favors or good will or what have you, if/when I need it. Would you dilapidate all of your savings just because you can? Would you buy high and sell low? You wouldn't because it'd be against revealed wisdom, or because it'd be irrational?
But of course, I most definitely can do bad towards someone, if it were to please me. My ethics stand on the crucial fact that it doesn't please me (it never did and I foresee that it will never do), for the reasons stated above. And please, don't bring the "what if you could get away with it" scenario, it wouldn't change a iota: the amount of resources needed to assure myself that I will in fact get away with it exceeds any gain (by a simple counting argument, I need an infinite number of assessments to make the probability exactly zero), material or psychological, that I could derive from doing wrong.
I want to make clear two things: First, I maintain that neither Good (capital G) nor Evil (capital E) exist as things. The words "good" and "evil" are adjectives, not abstract nouns (in English, that is. In Spanish, my native tongue, I'd impeach the use of the equivalent "Bien/bueno", "Mal/malo"). I'm of the idea that the phrase (for instance) "Evil is everywhere" makes no more sense that "Softness is everywhere".
Second, I'd rather not answer for (or defend!) myself. I was originally making the point that postmodernism doesn't lead logically to nihilism, and that for instance a naturalistic ethics can represent a valid middle ground. I think that Gilles Deleuze came to the same conclusion after reading Spinoza.
I don't see how such a thing is possible. I cannot knowingly commit a good act without having a concept of Good. Likewise, I cannot have a concept for redness without knowing what Red is.
Of course you can. You can do good things because you feel that you would like everybody to behave with you in a similar manner, even though you know not everybody will. To those that do, you call them good persons; to those that don't (those who cheat, or take advantage, or whatever) you call them bad or evil persons. What's Good, God and the Devil have to do anything with that?
And of course, red is a sensation correlated with a certain wavelength, not the wavelength per se.
To "answer Dostoievski:" yes, all things are permissible; that doesn't mean you have to carry them out.
Dostoyevsky, of course, did not agree with that assertion himself, it was, rather, that of a character in one of his books to point out the absurdity of such thinking.
First, the nit: Hardly could I implicate the real Dostoievski in the debate, especially since I know what Crime and Punishment is about, hence the quotes.
And really, if all things are permissable, on what grounds can you possibly oppose killing someone, for instance?
On any number of relative judgments of value. For a perverse example: on laziness. Killing someone is such a chore! For a personal example: I believe in a retributive ethics: I won't do to anybody what I wouldn't like being done to myself. Of course, I was raised a Catholic, and I attended Catholic school and Mass for, like, twelve years. I haven't, since I lost (or rather, since I jettisoned) my faith, lost my ethics (but of course, I do realize that you are entitled not to believe me on this one.)
Answering this is impossible without appealing to some external concept of higher good, which you've already rejected but will have to rely on in your defense. End of argument.
I just did: retributive ethics is sufficient. I know I can't convince you that I'm a well-behaved person, and I know I can't ask you to take my word for it.
Oh really? So you're willing to stand there and tell me that Good and Evil do not exist, but yet there is presumably some other standard by which you can determine whether something is ethical?
This is why postmodern philosophers all reach the same (correctly reasoned) conclusion: that there can be no good or evil, everything is relative, and the best we can hope for is to sink into a nihilistic morass. As Dostoevsky said, "If God does not exist, all things are permissable."
What's with the hypostases? The perceived "nihilistic relativism in Postmodernism" is a slander. What postmodernist philosophers do is reject all "concepts incarnate", i.e. hypostases. As anti-metaphysicists, it is only logical to point out the (rather obvious) fact that there is no "thing" which we call "Good" (or "Evil", or "Justice", or...). At best it's objectifying a category (akin to considering, say, "Red" from redness, or "Warmth" as stand-alone entities, which doesn't make sense); at worst, it's a form of intellectual dishonesty, selectively choosing which "accidents" (a concept also to be rejected, as in "nature/accident") to consider as things.
Think of it as a form of disentangling the (flawed) concept of Good from just doing good, and that of Evil from wrongdoing. There's no way that the logical rejection of Good and Evil can lead logically to a rejection of ethics. It should entail a rejection of morality (conceived as a transcendent code of conduct, that somehow is "inherent" to Man (another hypostasis, see?)), but on the basis outlined above, not out of sheer perversity. To "answer Dostoievski:" yes, all things are permissible; that doesn't mean you have to carry them out.
I'm sick of these two thousand three hundred and fifty years of Aristotelianism. Enough already!
In what way was Memento a science-oriented film? How does it fit in with Good Will Hunting or A Beautiful Mind (which was good mostly due to Jennifer Connley -- how did she stay so damn good looking?).
A coworker of mine happens to have been a classmate of hers in HS. When Requiem for a dream came out he told me "you know, on the last scene, the orgy one, well, the actress was my classmate and such." I thought he was telling me about the other one, but no. I told him: "you know, she's a protagonist, you know? Like, she's on the entire movie." The thing that makes me want to kill him is that he doesn't like her acting. I told him, she was brilliant in A beautiful mind, and that in my opinion she saved the movie; but he won't have watching the movie 'cos it's a Ron Howard shit.
Funny thing is, how in heaven did I, an Argentine, end up working in Argentina with an American that knows a celebrity? The world is very small.
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 1
It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.
Slashdot Mirror
A side note: I've seem to have commited the sin of misattribution. Waldemar Horwat is not the current driver (or a peer) of the JS module at Mozilla: Brendan Eich (the original author at Netscape) is. Mr. Horwat seems to have been one of the redactors of the ECMA standard, though.
JavaScript is a really nice language. For starters, Waldemar Horwat sure knows his stuff. He seems to give a lot of thought to new features before introducing them (check out the project page) and has managed to write an interpreter that can be configured to accept varying language versions (as in language="JavaScriptXXX"). Then, the whole idea of a prototype-based object-oriented language becoming mainstream should have made the Self team green with envy. It supports very powerful constructs, like dynamically attaching behavior to built-in objects via __prototype.
Besides, JavaScript inconsistencies between browsers is mainly a DOM issue, not a language one. Chromatic should have blamed the browsers, not the language.
Go see Safe , by Todd Haynes. Forget about interpretations and allegories, and just try to empathize with Julianne Moore (a terrific performance, BTW).
The logic is complexity inherent to the application. The null command is the simplest to understand and use, the most reliable of all commands in any imperative language, but it hardly does what you need done. I'm not saying you to get rid of your application logic.
What I'm saying is that in matching impedances between application "objects" (loosely speaking, both the OO- and the Relational variety) and application "effects" (rules, triggers, procedures, methods, whatever that elicits a computation) you should strive for the minimum added complexity. Dispensing with the relational model is one way, automating the marshalling and unmarshalling to/from RDBMSs is another. What I opine is that the second way should be considered seriously, as it might cheaper according to a number of metrics: cost of migration, cost of ownership of heterogeneous front ends (not just front views, but full-fledged front-end actors), etc.
The motto is: neither methodologies nor duct tape are a panacea. But you know which is cheaper.
I'd rather get rid of the objects.
Let me explain: there is a common misperception of encapsulation being about state when in all truth it is only about logic: if you think of an object as a FSM (a simplifying assumption that holds water most of the time, for reasons having to do with the psychological management of complexity) the number of data bits is proportional to the logarithm of the number of states, but the count of logic branches is proportional to the square of the number of states (that is, the number of transitions).
That's why using an RDBMS is so much simpler than writing business objects: the manipulation is simple, direct, unmediated.
I think it would be best to start investing time in autocoders that encapsulate Java for the RDBMS.
Don't tell me that the quest for the meaningful, objective benchmark has ended in success.
I won't research for you, but if you're interested, the preprints archive at LANL has a lot of relevant theory. Basically, the current research is trying to come with a unified framework for so-called "phase transitions" in stochastic discrete processes. One of the most studied problems is the transition between "easy" and "hard" problems in 3-SAT (three-satisfiability). Brian Hayes has a very readable article about this phenomenon, with references. The authority in this field seems to be Gabriel Istrate.
The emergence of the giant component in random networks is a mature field of research, of course pioneered by Erdös, and with players of the likes of Don Knuth and Doron Zeilberger.
From a mathematical standpoint, Graph Theory per se is not really complicated, what actually is is the asymptotic analysis of stochastic processes.
HTH,
Matas
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0: Tue Jun 11 06:14:12 GMT 2002 .. ../x: Directory not empty .. . ./x: Directory not empty
Welcome to FreeBSD!
[Z:~] I% mkdir x
[Z:~] I% cd x
[Z:~/x] I% mkdir x
[Z:~/x] I% mv x
mv: rename x to
[Z:~/x] I% cd
[Z:~] I% mv x/x
mv: rename x/x to
Names changed to let the guilty run away scot-free...
IMHO, perhaps they are both correct, and it all depends on how you look at it/what you are looking for
What, both Maldacena-Theory and Spin Networks? String theory has written Epicicles all over it. The fact that Ptolemaus' theory was held up as dogma for thirteen hundred years didn't make it any more correct, you know.
Spin Networks are really satisfactory from a, um, shall I say paraphysical
point of view. No space, no time and especially no causality underneath but only relationships! Parmenides revived!It might be worth perusing the discussion on OSNews. The argument pro revolves around the question of how much is your time worth, as a non-OS programmer. The argument con hinges on various issues of relevance and desirability (as you point out).
Pepper has a lot for it in that it is an editor that strove from the start to be an outstanding GUI editor. As Hekkelman himself tells in the interview, the architecture has a couple of nice features not really found on other editors (except, perhaps, MPW for Classic Mac OS. Witness the long mourning some regulars to the mpw-dev list go through still to this day): journal-based edit log for unlimited replay (as opposed to merely undo), superior rendering, virtual file editing, programmable syntax highligting, etc. Many Open Source text widgets could benefit enormously from importing/integrating Pepper code.
Then again, maybe not. Editors tend to be a notoriously religious bone of contention.
Apostasy is the way out.
He was the quintessential modern programmer. Every one of his writings is a modernist manifesto in itself (cf. Marinetti [1]).
AEsthetic movements strive for that kernel of emptiness present in every stylistic endeavor: Michelangelo spoke famously of sculpture being already present in the block of marble, waiting for him to chop away the excess and liberate it. Futurism saw poetry in the void between the stars as much as in the void between the electrons. Postmodernism vacates the space of global narratives (i.e., myths) and lets the dust of the micro-stories to settle down afterwards (think of minimalism in architecture).
Art is about hacking off the crud, as much as programming is.
[...] the barrier between thought and language, at high academic levels, becomes very fuzzy, and a lot of the terminology serves to obfuscate.
Boy I had to double-take. I read that as theology.
Sorry to pick nits, but the name is Amalthea (ah-mal-THEH-ah), it means "the Goddess Amal" (IIRC a Babylonian name for Astarte, the Moon goddess). She was the goat that nursed Jupiter (Zeus, actually) in Mount Ida, and whose horn the baby god pulled with his mighty force while playing with her. That horn is called the Cornucopia, or the Horn of Plenty, after Jupiter, ashamed at his own clumsiness, bestowed that gift on the goat as an apology.
Don't quote me on this, but I think there are penguin colonies as north as Bahia Blanca in the Buenos Aires province (the major indentation in the Atlantic coast of South America). There are colonies in the Valdez peninsula (the silly thingamajig further south, where all the whales and stuff are).
I don't really know about Chile, 'cos I think the prevailing bird in the Southern Pacific coast is the cormorant.
Argentina is a natural place for proper, ecologically sound care and feeding of Linux.
The third world is a good option. Cheap wages, highly educated middle-upper classes, good connections to the I'net. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, Uruguay are obvious (and alphabetically sorted!) candidates for hosting OS endeavors.
Imagine what a little donation can do in these countries!
Full disclosure: I'm Argentine.
Hm, no. I mean yes, I do have a rational basis for adhering to a retributive ethics; I just didn't made it explicit because I thought it was irrelevant. Various attempts at formalizing retributive behavior have been carried out, and it was argued that it makes sense from both a game-theoretic and an evolutionary point of view. And I'm not "acting as if I presuppose the Christian theistic world-view", for the simple fact that I don't believe in it. It is you that interpret my ethics as stemming from a theistic world-view. Your "as-if" betrays your assumption. Besides, how can you possibly know what I "fully believe" or not?
Because the golden rule Just Makes Sense (TM). To me, as a human being in a society, doing "bad" ("mean", "evil", whatever; but note: as a quality of my acts, not of my self) things is a waste of energy and time, and an opportunity lost for receiving favors or good will or what have you, if/when I need it. Would you dilapidate all of your savings just because you can? Would you buy high and sell low? You wouldn't because it'd be against revealed wisdom, or because it'd be irrational?
But of course, I most definitely can do bad towards someone, if it were to please me. My ethics stand on the crucial fact that it doesn't please me (it never did and I foresee that it will never do), for the reasons stated above. And please, don't bring the "what if you could get away with it" scenario, it wouldn't change a iota: the amount of resources needed to assure myself that I will in fact get away with it exceeds any gain (by a simple counting argument, I need an infinite number of assessments to make the probability exactly zero), material or psychological, that I could derive from doing wrong.
I want to make clear two things: First, I maintain that neither Good (capital G) nor Evil (capital E) exist as things. The words "good" and "evil" are adjectives, not abstract nouns (in English, that is. In Spanish, my native tongue, I'd impeach the use of the equivalent "Bien/bueno", "Mal/malo"). I'm of the idea that the phrase (for instance) "Evil is everywhere" makes no more sense that "Softness is everywhere".
Second, I'd rather not answer for (or defend!) myself. I was originally making the point that postmodernism doesn't lead logically to nihilism, and that for instance a naturalistic ethics can represent a valid middle ground. I think that Gilles Deleuze came to the same conclusion after reading Spinoza.
Of course, that didn't make him much good.
Amazing how, under all that vinyl, she still manages to smile...
whats more anti-american than giving something away for free and demanding nothing
Please tell me that this is a sarcastic remark...
Of course you can. You can do good things because you feel that you would like everybody to behave with you in a similar manner, even though you know not everybody will. To those that do, you call them good persons; to those that don't (those who cheat, or take advantage, or whatever) you call them bad or evil persons. What's Good, God and the Devil have to do anything with that?
And of course, red is a sensation correlated with a certain wavelength, not the wavelength per se.
And, since this too merits some form of answer:
First, the nit: Hardly could I implicate the real Dostoievski in the debate, especially since I know what Crime and Punishment is about, hence the quotes.
On any number of relative judgments of value. For a perverse example: on laziness. Killing someone is such a chore! For a personal example: I believe in a retributive ethics: I won't do to anybody what I wouldn't like being done to myself. Of course, I was raised a Catholic, and I attended Catholic school and Mass for, like, twelve years. I haven't, since I lost (or rather, since I jettisoned) my faith, lost my ethics (but of course, I do realize that you are entitled not to believe me on this one.)
I just did: retributive ethics is sufficient. I know I can't convince you that I'm a well-behaved person, and I know I can't ask you to take my word for it.
Yes. John 13, 34--35.
What's with the hypostases? The perceived "nihilistic relativism in Postmodernism" is a slander. What postmodernist philosophers do is reject all "concepts incarnate", i.e. hypostases. As anti-metaphysicists, it is only logical to point out the (rather obvious) fact that there is no "thing" which we call "Good" (or "Evil", or "Justice", or...). At best it's objectifying a category (akin to considering, say, "Red" from redness, or "Warmth" as stand-alone entities, which doesn't make sense); at worst, it's a form of intellectual dishonesty, selectively choosing which "accidents" (a concept also to be rejected, as in "nature/accident") to consider as things.
Think of it as a form of disentangling the (flawed) concept of Good from just doing good, and that of Evil from wrongdoing. There's no way that the logical rejection of Good and Evil can lead logically to a rejection of ethics. It should entail a rejection of morality (conceived as a transcendent code of conduct, that somehow is "inherent" to Man (another hypostasis, see?)), but on the basis outlined above, not out of sheer perversity. To "answer Dostoievski:" yes, all things are permissible; that doesn't mean you have to carry them out.
I'm sick of these two thousand three hundred and fifty years of Aristotelianism. Enough already!
A coworker of mine happens to have been a classmate of hers in HS. When Requiem for a dream came out he told me "you know, on the last scene, the orgy one, well, the actress was my classmate and such." I thought he was telling me about the other one, but no. I told him: "you know, she's a protagonist, you know? Like, she's on the entire movie." The thing that makes me want to kill him is that he doesn't like her acting. I told him, she was brilliant in A beautiful mind, and that in my opinion she saved the movie; but he won't have watching the movie 'cos it's a Ron Howard shit.
Funny thing is, how in heaven did I, an Argentine, end up working in Argentina with an American that knows a celebrity? The world is very small.
Yes! Yes!
Yes, yes...
Erm...