So why is it that we can still read Middle English and early Modern English? It's because during the Old English period there were almost no efforts to standardize spelling and grammar but in the Middle English period earnest standardization efforts were made and the printing press cemented these efforts at the beginning of the Modern English period.
A little fracas in 1066 followed by a Norman French takeover and massive influx of French vocabulary and ditching of a fair amount of Germanic grammar (we don't say "I have my Uncle Jan a pen bought" any more, but the Germans and Dutch do the equivalent) may have had something to do with it, too.
Natural selection just deals with the local situation. While an increase in organization and sophistication may often lead to a reproductive advantage, it may not always do so. Vide parasites like the tapeworm, or those blind fish that live in caves.
Also, as long as they're actually spoken, languages are always changing. One of the ways we know about how Latin evolved into the various Romance languages is from the period equivalents of William Safire or John Simon, who wrote rants saying stuff like "It's equus, dang it, not caballus!"
I don't think French is all that held together. Compare and contrast official French with Quebec French, or even more drastically, with Cajun French. (Parisian French has a preterite tense, but it's almost never used; the present perfect has just about taken over. Cajun French takes that to another level, chucking the French future tense and using "going to X" in its place. Cajun French rolls its "r"s, rather than using the Parisian French uvular "r".)
That said... language changes, like it or not. Otherwise there wouldn't be all these funny dialects of Vulgar Latin going around, and we'd still be able to read Beowulf (not the cluster...) in the original as easily as Icelandic schoolchildren read the Eddas. You also have cause and effect backwards with respect to dictionaries. As people have said ever since the big Webster's Third brouhaha, dictionaries are descriptive. Words end up in the dictionary because people use them.
BTW...verbs have conjugations; nouns have declensions (not declinations--stars have those, along with right ascensions).
...to some of the tracks on Sanford Ponder's Etosha album on the old Private Music label. No offense intended to Mr. Ponder, whose work I like a lot, but I swear it reminds me of one of the tracks on that album.
Having read TFA, I find myself struck by nothing so much as how very much like a blog entry this alleged "article" reads.
I agree, with the following qualification: the article reads like a bad blog entry. Its author seems to be terminally obsessed with his own fancied cleverness.
They have a random number generator...which, if it's truly random, will eventually generate every possible finite sequence from [01]*, even those that have a lot more 0s than 1s or vice versa...and in a couple of instances, after the fact, they noticed that one of those skewed sequences occurred before some momentous event.
That's not predicting the future...that's cherry-picking data that fit one's preconceived notions.
Is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on "NOT SUCKING"
I'm reminded of Stan Kelly-Bootle's humorous example of an algorithm... in pseudocode rather than the original flowchart, here's SKB's "algorithm" for maximizing human happiness:
while (human happiness can be increased)
increase human happiness;
The joke, of course, is that it's not an algorithm at all; the steps are all utterly ill-defined.
Making the GIMP's UI not suck is a worthy goal. Care to specify in detail what currently sucks about it and how it can be made better?
I would dearly love to see/. charge posters a nickel for every post that says "GIMP's UI sucks" without a description of how it sucks and a description of how it can be improved that could actually be implemented.
1. I'm sure you meant to write "for (i = 10; i <= 100; i++)"
2. C's for loop construct is one of its good points, as it lets one put loop control in one place for a far broader range of loops than just iteration over an arithmetic sequence, e.g.
for (ptr = head; ptr != NULL; ptr = ptr->next)
becomes immediately recognizable as an idiom for iterating over a linked list.
If memory serves, Forrest Ackerman came up with "sci-fi" back in the 1950s by analogy with "hi-fi." The term is widely loathed; I recall a letter to the editor in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in which the writer used the term; the editor inserted the comment "SF, dammit!"
Neither diagram shows any, but I think it could be argued to exist--the keywords struct and union, long and short (note that the "at least 64-bit type" C9X mandates is called long long int, just as it would likely be called in Algol 68 for a target where int is 16 bits), the notion of coercion. (There may well be others I am overlooking.)
...now that ATI has finally gotten their act together WRT Linux drivers, they are a viable competitor to nvidia in that market.
I'm glad to hear that. Any word on full Linux support for the All-in-Wonder cards or HDTV Wonder? Last time I looked, they are only doing drivers for "sufficiently recent" cards, meaning that I with my AIW Radeon am out of luck--is that still the case?
So it's not ok for the government to prohibit drugs, but it's just fine for your employer to?
Yes, for exactly the same reason that you can choose who you do business with on whatever basis you wish, be it reading Consumer Reports, or deciding that some company's ads are irritating or offensive or that you don't care for some aspect of their behavior.
I am sure most of these programs are small and maintained by a few people.
Uh... Google for LINPACK, EISPACK, LAPACK et al. These are pretty hefty pieces of code, written and tuned to a fare-thee-well to do what they do as well as possible. If you know the algorithms, you have a leg up on understanding the code, but at least in the old days (I can't vouch for FORTRAN 9x), you had to write out explicit loops to express what math notation does with much greater concision. Memory constraints and the wish to deal with large problems led to very ugly and error-prone methods of reusing storage (some time, with a safely empty stomach, look up EQUIVALENCE).
It wasn't DESIGNED to be a pretty language; it was designed to be used by people who would have stared blankly at you if you'd mentioned the concept of a pretty language.
More to the point, it was designed before people knew much about parsing and formal language theory...hence the cheesy ad hoc methods used to parse it, the fixed format, the Hollerith format item, and the infamous "DO 100 I = 1.10" problem.
Maybe next time the author will be more politcally correct in his examples.
On the contrary, he was quite politically correct; he gratuitously dragged leftist political views into a technical discussion.
Come to think of it, maybe not. If he were really politically correct, he'd be writing about how elegance in coding and correctness of code is an imperialist concept foisted on us by Dead White European Males, and that programs are texts that have no inherent meaning.
Bogus analogy. The police aren't the ones doing the damage (in theory, anyway); they're paid to defend you. Welfare, at least by the previous poster's justification, is paying the people who would otherwise mug/murder/etc. you to survive or get money. It's the Piranha Brothers' "Other Other Operation," a protection racket.
Actually, I have a Toshiba, um... (pause to look it up) PDR-M700 that indeed actually had a firmware upgrade. The upgrade added features, notably manual focus (a godsend, because the camera's autofocus is unusable at low light levels). See this page for details of upgrading, and this PDF for documentation of the features added and how to use them.
Yeah and YOU will suffer the consequences when your city is overwhelmed by several million homeless people.
So, it's really a protection racket, eh? Give me money or {I'll make your life hell, you'll have to pay more to defend against me and those like me,...}. I suppose I should thank you for stripping the phony veneer of benevolence from it.
Not from their point of view. The number one priority is to maintain the OS monopoly and applications barrier to entry... and that's what the "XP Starter Edition" is for.
Surely someone's mentioned the drug pusher analogy by now. The first one is cheap, or free. Once you're hooked, the price goes up.
A graphic that is said to be the redesigned logo is on this thread in G4's "The Screen Savers" forum. I can understand why they'd pull that... it looks like a really bad 60's era logo/test pattern, right down to the blur.
What's the point in magnifying raster images? Do you expect to see more details?
No, but when you're stuck with a web page made by doofuses who encode text as graphics so that they can use their 1337 font, control-plus doesn't do much to make the text bigger.
Seeing as how so many big business supporters argue that government can't do things like this profitably, shouldn't the big business here be smiling, confident that they'll be able to make a profit because the government's pipeline will be too expensive?
Doesn't work that way. The government doesn't have to be efficient, because it can always vote itself more of your money rather than directly making the recipients of the service pay for its inefficiency. (Not that I have a whole lot of sympathy for companies like RBOCs and cable TV providers, who have government-granted monopolies.)
Slashdot Mirror
So why is it that we can still read Middle English and early Modern English? It's because during the Old English period there were almost no efforts to standardize spelling and grammar but in the Middle English period earnest standardization efforts were made and the printing press cemented these efforts at the beginning of the Modern English period.
A little fracas in 1066 followed by a Norman French takeover and massive influx of French vocabulary and ditching of a fair amount of Germanic grammar (we don't say "I have my Uncle Jan a pen bought" any more, but the Germans and Dutch do the equivalent) may have had something to do with it, too.
Natural selection just deals with the local situation. While an increase in organization and sophistication may often lead to a reproductive advantage, it may not always do so. Vide parasites like the tapeworm, or those blind fish that live in caves.
Also, as long as they're actually spoken, languages are always changing. One of the ways we know about how Latin evolved into the various Romance languages is from the period equivalents of William Safire or John Simon, who wrote rants saying stuff like "It's equus, dang it, not caballus!"
I don't think French is all that held together. Compare and contrast official French with Quebec French, or even more drastically, with Cajun French. (Parisian French has a preterite tense, but it's almost never used; the present perfect has just about taken over. Cajun French takes that to another level, chucking the French future tense and using "going to X" in its place. Cajun French rolls its "r"s, rather than using the Parisian French uvular "r".)
That said... language changes, like it or not. Otherwise there wouldn't be all these funny dialects of Vulgar Latin going around, and we'd still be able to read Beowulf (not the cluster...) in the original as easily as Icelandic schoolchildren read the Eddas. You also have cause and effect backwards with respect to dictionaries. As people have said ever since the big Webster's Third brouhaha, dictionaries are descriptive. Words end up in the dictionary because people use them.
BTW...verbs have conjugations; nouns have declensions (not declinations--stars have those, along with right ascensions).
...to some of the tracks on Sanford Ponder's Etosha album on the old Private Music label. No offense intended to Mr. Ponder, whose work I like a lot, but I swear it reminds me of one of the tracks on that album.
Having read TFA, I find myself struck by nothing so much as how very much like a blog entry this alleged "article" reads.
I agree, with the following qualification: the article reads like a bad blog entry. Its author seems to be terminally obsessed with his own fancied cleverness.
They have a random number generator...which, if it's truly random, will eventually generate every possible finite sequence from [01]*, even those that have a lot more 0s than 1s or vice versa...and in a couple of instances, after the fact, they noticed that one of those skewed sequences occurred before some momentous event.
That's not predicting the future...that's cherry-picking data that fit one's preconceived notions.
Is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on "NOT SUCKING"
/. charge posters a nickel for every post that says "GIMP's UI sucks" without a description of how it sucks and a description of how it can be improved that could actually be implemented.
I'm reminded of Stan Kelly-Bootle's humorous example of an algorithm... in pseudocode rather than the original flowchart, here's SKB's "algorithm" for maximizing human happiness:
while (human happiness can be increased)
increase human happiness;
The joke, of course, is that it's not an algorithm at all; the steps are all utterly ill-defined.
Making the GIMP's UI not suck is a worthy goal. Care to specify in detail what currently sucks about it and how it can be made better?
I would dearly love to see
I'm no fan of C, but...
1. I'm sure you meant to write "for (i = 10; i <= 100; i++)"
2. C's for loop construct is one of its good points, as it lets one put loop control in one place for a far broader range of loops than just iteration over an arithmetic sequence, e.g.
for (ptr = head; ptr != NULL; ptr = ptr->next)
becomes immediately recognizable as an idiom for iterating over a linked list.
If memory serves, Forrest Ackerman came up with "sci-fi" back in the 1950s by analogy with "hi-fi." The term is widely loathed; I recall a letter to the editor in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in which the writer used the term; the editor inserted the comment "SF, dammit!"
Agreed, Programmers should use the typedefs that C9X sets up for that purpose, and the corresponding macros for format strings.
That said, it is nevertheless the case that, from the description of LLONG_MAX and ULLONG_MAX in limits.h, long long int has to be at least 64 bits.
Neither diagram shows any, but I think it could be argued to exist--the keywords struct and union, long and short (note that the "at least 64-bit type" C9X mandates is called long long int, just as it would likely be called in Algol 68 for a target where int is 16 bits), the notion of coercion. (There may well be others I am overlooking.)
...now that ATI has finally gotten their act together WRT Linux drivers, they are a viable competitor to nvidia in that market.
I'm glad to hear that. Any word on full Linux support for the All-in-Wonder cards or HDTV Wonder? Last time I looked, they are only doing drivers for "sufficiently recent" cards, meaning that I with my AIW Radeon am out of luck--is that still the case?
So it's not ok for the government to prohibit drugs, but it's just fine for your employer to?
Yes, for exactly the same reason that you can choose who you do business with on whatever basis you wish, be it reading Consumer Reports, or deciding that some company's ads are irritating or offensive or that you don't care for some aspect of their behavior.
I am sure most of these programs are small and maintained by a few people.
Uh... Google for LINPACK, EISPACK, LAPACK et al. These are pretty hefty pieces of code, written and tuned to a fare-thee-well to do what they do as well as possible. If you know the algorithms, you have a leg up on understanding the code, but at least in the old days (I can't vouch for FORTRAN 9x), you had to write out explicit loops to express what math notation does with much greater concision. Memory constraints and the wish to deal with large problems led to very ugly and error-prone methods of reusing storage (some time, with a safely empty stomach, look up EQUIVALENCE).
It wasn't DESIGNED to be a pretty language; it was designed to be used by people who would have stared blankly at you if you'd mentioned the concept of a pretty language.
More to the point, it was designed before people knew much about parsing and formal language theory...hence the cheesy ad hoc methods used to parse it, the fixed format, the Hollerith format item, and the infamous "DO 100 I = 1.10" problem.
Maybe next time the author will be more politcally correct in his examples.
On the contrary, he was quite politically correct; he gratuitously dragged leftist political views into a technical discussion.
Come to think of it, maybe not. If he were really politically correct, he'd be writing about how elegance in coding and correctness of code is an imperialist concept foisted on us by Dead White European Males, and that programs are texts that have no inherent meaning.
Perhaps those of us who have submissions rejected should try sending them to Roland Piquepaille...
THIS HAS BEEN FIXED...
/. had changed its site design.
Darn. For a second I'd hoped that you meant
Bogus analogy. The police aren't the ones doing the damage (in theory, anyway); they're paid to defend you. Welfare, at least by the previous poster's justification, is paying the people who would otherwise mug/murder/etc. you to survive or get money. It's the Piranha Brothers' "Other Other Operation," a protection racket.
Actually, I have a Toshiba, um... (pause to look it up) PDR-M700 that indeed actually had a firmware upgrade. The upgrade added features, notably manual focus (a godsend, because the camera's autofocus is unusable at low light levels). See this page for details of upgrading, and this PDF for documentation of the features added and how to use them.
Yeah and YOU will suffer the consequences when your city is overwhelmed by several million homeless people.
...}. I suppose I should thank you for stripping the phony veneer of benevolence from it.
So, it's really a protection racket, eh? Give me money or {I'll make your life hell, you'll have to pay more to defend against me and those like me,
Microsoft really has their priorities screwed up.
Not from their point of view. The number one priority is to maintain the OS monopoly and applications barrier to entry... and that's what the "XP Starter Edition" is for.
Surely someone's mentioned the drug pusher analogy by now. The first one is cheap, or free. Once you're hooked, the price goes up.
A graphic that is said to be the redesigned logo is on this thread in G4's "The Screen Savers" forum. I can understand why they'd pull that... it looks like a really bad 60's era logo/test pattern, right down to the blur.
What's the point in magnifying raster images? Do you expect to see more details?
No, but when you're stuck with a web page made by doofuses who encode text as graphics so that they can use their 1337 font, control-plus doesn't do much to make the text bigger.
Seeing as how so many big business supporters argue that government can't do things like this profitably, shouldn't the big business here be smiling, confident that they'll be able to make a profit because the government's pipeline will be too expensive?
Doesn't work that way. The government doesn't have to be efficient, because it can always vote itself more of your money rather than directly making the recipients of the service pay for its inefficiency. (Not that I have a whole lot of sympathy for companies like RBOCs and cable TV providers, who have government-granted monopolies.)