That chart just appears to be the grammar for Pascal. You could produce a chart just like that for C++ using the C++ grammar.
Agreed, but for Pascal you won't run into any constructs that are recognized by the same chunk of "Railroad Normal Form" but which have radically different semantics--over and above the usual things you can't capture in a context-free grammar.
That is, Pascal doesn't have C++'s "if you can interpret it as a declaration, it's a declaration" rule.
From what I've read, C++ has the same difficulty as the original FORTRAN did; the original parser was ad hoc, so that it was a nightmare to parse with reasonable techniques, and arguably therefore harder for humans to deal with.
Amen to that. The "Super Computer Sale" (can I buy a Cray there?) that wanders around the country and appears at the Iowa State Fairgrounds each May and November was a farm-raised hacker's dream when it started out, but each year it has shrunk, and for a few years now they've only taken up half the 4-H building with a thinning selection of computer products (and a growing contingent of used systems)--the remainder of the building now is filled with people selling coats, knick-knacks and gaudy stuff that I presume goes over big in the "hood." Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
Well, I may be athier than most, but I couldn't say I am athiest.
Seriously:/. readers probably aren't a representative sample of the general population, but OTOH, such a vast majority of people claim the believe that there is a god of some sort that if I were a gambling man, I'd bet that most/. readers share that belief.
I don't believe science has all the answers; just that the other means of figuring out the universe have turned out to be pretty well worthless, and that there's no reason to think that any of the religions people have come up with are true.
No computer can act as fast, sorting through a lifetime of experience in a fraction of a second and coming to a correct conclusion.
You know, that's a skill I could use. Those times that I have the "aha!" seem to always be preceded by a lot of study and thought and beating my head against the wall. From what I've read about considerably more insightful examples of that experience (e.g. Kekule and the benzene ring) I'm not alone. "Chance favors the prepared mind," as Pasteur said. How do you know that that "sudden" flash of recognition isn't just the figurative signal sent by a background task that's been running for a long time?
What's wrong with existing as a human? Why do we have to constantly "improve" upon our existence? My take on any modifications to humanity are such that it's basically pointless. We might be smarter, but will we be happier? That's what life is about.
Ask my mother, who had to care for my father during his descent into Alzheimer's, and whose dream of going places and doing things during retirement turned into a nightmare of losing her lifelong companion followed by bleak widowhood. If you survive her response, I'll be sorely tempted to finish the job for her.
Long ago, I read a book written by a doctor, who bloviated on about what he considered the "bright side" of what was then called senile dementia. He spouted BS about a "Puzzled Angel" whose attentions took the aged into a supposedly better world of reliving their youth and childhood. I'm glad I never met the [expletive] who wrote that. To give up is to be less than human. I'm with Dylan Thomas in this issue, thank you very much.
If we currently don't even cough up enough welfare to help the poor afford basic things like food and heat, what on God's fucking greeen Earth makes you think that we will EVER be giving them ANY version of nanobots?
s/nanobots/television/, and I bet someone back in the early days of television said the result. Today, just about everybody in the US has a TV, including the poor.
You have it backwards. The rich are early adopters. They'll get nanobot 1.0 (the throwaway delivered to customers, per Brooks's famous line), and everybody else gets nanobot 1.x or 2.x.
I botched the setup for ivtv and lirc in/etc/modules.conf on my wife's computer, so that it panicked during boot. Fired up Knoppix, pulled the bogus lines from/etc/modules.conf, and all was well again. Whew.
And amateur radio operators won't have a chance to practice for those emergencies because the rest of the time, QRM from BPL will render the frequencies useless. Brilliant!
Believe me, I'm aware of that. (I'm pretty sure I contain some potassium-40, too.) The previous poster wasn't--he or she didn't specify dangerously radioactive, just "radioactive for thousands of years."
Computer Shopper went down the tubes when Ziff-Davis bought it from Stan Veit, told all the "classic computer" columnists to buzz off, and turned it into a PClone-only rag.
As has been copiously noted, it lost its only remaining function when it became far easier to get far more up-to-date data on the Web. I'm not sure whether I saved any of the 1000+ page issues from the era when I called it "Deforestation Monthly," but it's sad to see it now at about 170 pages. The date of its demise can't be that far off.
I have a hard time seeing how anyone familiar with the x86 architecture and just about any other recent processor architecture can be a fan of the x86. The x86 architecture is ugly and irregular, the result of decades of backwards compatibility. The performance such CPUs is where it is now because x86 instructions are interpreted on the fly into something decent, and I really wish that AMD and Intel would make those architectures public, so that all that chip real estate could be devoted to something other than backwards compatibility and so that compiler writers would never have to deal with the x86 again.
ObOSX: Yes, I would, assuming that drivers that can make full use of all the hardware I currently have were available. I'd be inclined to set up dual boot (OS X and Linux).
Agreed. If I want to listen to a foul-mouthed blowhard jerk, there's a copious supply available for free just about anywhere. Ditto for verbally abusive sphincters, which renders the Don & Mike show superfluous.
I dislike censorship as much as anyone, but perversely, it's had a beneficial effect. I go through a cycle of listening to the Bob & Tom show, as my notion of whether it's worth listening to B&T's in-house bits to catch the very good comedians and humorists that they have on as guests. After a short interval, I remember why I stopped listening before, and stop again.
Bob and Tom's homegrown bits are mostly sniggering toilet and genitalia humor of a sort that most of us got past around seventh grade, heavily larded with a laugh track of themselves laughing at their own material. They need to be duct taped to a chair and forced to listen to an endless loop recording of Hamlet's advice to the players, OK?
These days, though, they've been kvetching about not being able to play a bunch of their material because of the FCC. This has the fortunate side effect of requiring them to skip the cheap laugh and actually say something funny. They've thus been dragged kicking and screaming into improvement.
This seems to be a general rule--John Kricfalusi did better work when he had to deal with the broadcast standards types. "Magic nose goblins" is infinitely funnier and more inventive than what he presumably initially wrote. When Ren & Stimpy finally came back under John K's control on Spike TV, the result, at least initially, was junk. Gross-out for gross-out's sake, unrelieved by anything resembling humor. I hope that he got it out of his system a la Dr. Johnny Fever saying "Booger," but that initial return, along with the ever-shifting Spike TV schedule at the time, persuaded me it wasn't worth tracking it down.
Re:More Democratic Market
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 1
They again, were entertainers...no one really goes and studies the "music" of Sinatra like one would go and study up on Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Jimmy Page....as in the art of music itself.
Have you ever said that in front of a singer? I expect you'd get the same look you'd get if you stood up in front of a bunch of hackers and said nobody bothers to study Knuth's code.
It took nVidia a while to get around to releasing a driver that could deal with 4K stacks, which more recent kernels have switched to from 8K. It was a pain in the posterior for Fedora Core 2 for a while, but no longer. Maybe that's what you're referring to?
All I know about Swahili (or kiswahili, if you will, to distinguish the language from waswahili, its speakers) is what I read about it around thirty-something years ago in a book by Mario Pei (and what I learned from Afro Sheen commercials watching Soul Train:), but OTOH the Kamusi Project online English-Swahili dictionary gives "huruma" for humanity. Looking for possible alternatives like "community" didn't turn up anything looking like "ubuntu."
OTOH, if I remember rightly, Swahili is a Bantu lingua franca with borrowings from Arabic. Since Nbdele and Zulu are Bantu languages, there may well be a cognate in Swahili that I don't know how to find in the online dictionary, or that might not be in it yet.
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That chart just appears to be the grammar for Pascal. You could produce a chart just like that for C++ using the C++ grammar.
Agreed, but for Pascal you won't run into any constructs that are recognized by the same chunk of "Railroad Normal Form" but which have radically different semantics--over and above the usual things you can't capture in a context-free grammar.
That is, Pascal doesn't have C++'s "if you can interpret it as a declaration, it's a declaration" rule.
From what I've read, C++ has the same difficulty as the original FORTRAN did; the original parser was ad hoc, so that it was a nightmare to parse with reasonable techniques, and arguably therefore harder for humans to deal with.
Soon I will be protected from the Terrible Secret of Space.
Amen to that. The "Super Computer Sale" (can I buy a Cray there?) that wanders around the country and appears at the Iowa State Fairgrounds each May and November was a farm-raised hacker's dream when it started out, but each year it has shrunk, and for a few years now they've only taken up half the 4-H building with a thinning selection of computer products (and a growing contingent of used systems)--the remainder of the building now is filled with people selling coats, knick-knacks and gaudy stuff that I presume goes over big in the "hood." Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
The man had a poor business sense and he didn't see the value in doing what he needed to do to win.
Yeah, poor guy. He had ethics.
Well, I may be athier than most, but I couldn't say I am athiest.
/. readers probably aren't a representative sample of the general population, but OTOH, such a vast majority of people claim the believe that there is a god of some sort that if I were a gambling man, I'd bet that most /. readers share that belief.
Seriously:
I don't believe science has all the answers; just that the other means of figuring out the universe have turned out to be pretty well worthless, and that there's no reason to think that any of the religions people have come up with are true.
No computer can act as fast, sorting through a lifetime of experience in a fraction of a second and coming to a correct conclusion.
You know, that's a skill I could use. Those times that I have the "aha!" seem to always be preceded by a lot of study and thought and beating my head against the wall. From what I've read about considerably more insightful examples of that experience (e.g. Kekule and the benzene ring) I'm not alone. "Chance favors the prepared mind," as Pasteur said. How do you know that that "sudden" flash of recognition isn't just the figurative signal sent by a background task that's been running for a long time?
I apologize for the above highly intemperate comment.
What's wrong with existing as a human? Why do we have to constantly "improve" upon our existence? My take on any modifications to humanity are such that it's basically pointless. We might be smarter, but will we be happier? That's what life is about.
Ask my mother, who had to care for my father during his descent into Alzheimer's, and whose dream of going places and doing things during retirement turned into a nightmare of losing her lifelong companion followed by bleak widowhood. If you survive her response, I'll be sorely tempted to finish the job for her.
Long ago, I read a book written by a doctor, who bloviated on about what he considered the "bright side" of what was then called senile dementia. He spouted BS about a "Puzzled Angel" whose attentions took the aged into a supposedly better world of reliving their youth and childhood. I'm glad I never met the [expletive] who wrote that. To give up is to be less than human. I'm with Dylan Thomas in this issue, thank you very much.
If we currently don't even cough up enough welfare to help the poor afford basic things like food and heat, what on God's fucking greeen Earth makes you think that we will EVER be giving them ANY version of nanobots?
s/nanobots/television/, and I bet someone back in the early days of television said the result. Today, just about everybody in the US has a TV, including the poor.
You have it backwards. The rich are early adopters. They'll get nanobot 1.0 (the throwaway delivered to customers, per Brooks's famous line), and everybody else gets nanobot 1.x or 2.x.
I botched the setup for ivtv and lirc in /etc/modules.conf on my wife's computer, so that it panicked during boot. Fired up Knoppix, pulled the bogus lines from /etc/modules.conf, and all was well again. Whew.
Yeah, what have hams given us anyway, aside from radio astronomy, packet radio, ...?
And amateur radio operators won't have a chance to practice for those emergencies because the rest of the time, QRM from BPL will render the frequencies useless. Brilliant!
Believe me, I'm aware of that. (I'm pretty sure I contain some potassium-40, too.) The previous poster wasn't--he or she didn't specify dangerously radioactive, just "radioactive for thousands of years."
For one, CO2 isn't radioactive for thousands of years.
Wanna bet? The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years.
Computer Shopper went down the tubes when Ziff-Davis bought it from Stan Veit, told all the "classic computer" columnists to buzz off, and turned it into a PClone-only rag.
As has been copiously noted, it lost its only remaining function when it became far easier to get far more up-to-date data on the Web. I'm not sure whether I saved any of the 1000+ page issues from the era when I called it "Deforestation Monthly," but it's sad to see it now at about 170 pages. The date of its demise can't be that far off.
I have a hard time seeing how anyone familiar with the x86 architecture and just about any other recent processor architecture can be a fan of the x86. The x86 architecture is ugly and irregular, the result of decades of backwards compatibility. The performance such CPUs is where it is now because x86 instructions are interpreted on the fly into something decent, and I really wish that AMD and Intel would make those architectures public, so that all that chip real estate could be devoted to something other than backwards compatibility and so that compiler writers would never have to deal with the x86 again.
ObOSX: Yes, I would, assuming that drivers that can make full use of all the hardware I currently have were available. I'd be inclined to set up dual boot (OS X and Linux).
Several reasons:
1. They wove IE into the OS for political reasons, and it's probably impractical to extract it.
2. XUL is threatening what Netscape once threatened, namely getting rid of the applications barrier to entry that preserves the OS monopoly.
3. MS can't be perceived as ever having lost. The image of the invincible monolith must be preserved.
People used a lot more commas back then. For another example, see the Second Amendment.
The Ping Wales article's link to Page 2 loops back to Page 1.
Agreed. If I want to listen to a foul-mouthed blowhard jerk, there's a copious supply available for free just about anywhere. Ditto for verbally abusive sphincters, which renders the Don & Mike show superfluous.
I dislike censorship as much as anyone, but perversely, it's had a beneficial effect. I go through a cycle of listening to the Bob & Tom show, as my notion of whether it's worth listening to B&T's in-house bits to catch the very good comedians and humorists that they have on as guests. After a short interval, I remember why I stopped listening before, and stop again.
Bob and Tom's homegrown bits are mostly sniggering toilet and genitalia humor of a sort that most of us got past around seventh grade, heavily larded with a laugh track of themselves laughing at their own material. They need to be duct taped to a chair and forced to listen to an endless loop recording of Hamlet's advice to the players, OK?
These days, though, they've been kvetching about not being able to play a bunch of their material because of the FCC. This has the fortunate side effect of requiring them to skip the cheap laugh and actually say something funny. They've thus been dragged kicking and screaming into improvement.
This seems to be a general rule--John Kricfalusi did better work when he had to deal with the broadcast standards types. "Magic nose goblins" is infinitely funnier and more inventive than what he presumably initially wrote. When Ren & Stimpy finally came back under John K's control on Spike TV, the result, at least initially, was junk. Gross-out for gross-out's sake, unrelieved by anything resembling humor. I hope that he got it out of his system a la Dr. Johnny Fever saying "Booger," but that initial return, along with the ever-shifting Spike TV schedule at the time, persuaded me it wasn't worth tracking it down.
They again, were entertainers...no one really goes and studies the "music" of Sinatra like one would go and study up on Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Jimmy Page....as in the art of music itself.
Have you ever said that in front of a singer? I expect you'd get the same look you'd get if you stood up in front of a bunch of hackers and said nobody bothers to study Knuth's code.
What does a penguin taste like, anyhow?
Maybe Lola Granola would know...?
"Darn it, it doesn't soar!" -- Lola Granola
It took nVidia a while to get around to releasing a driver that could deal with 4K stacks, which more recent kernels have switched to from 8K. It was a pain in the posterior for Fedora Core 2 for a while, but no longer. Maybe that's what you're referring to?
All I know about Swahili (or kiswahili, if you will, to distinguish the language from waswahili, its speakers) is what I read about it around thirty-something years ago in a book by Mario Pei (and what I learned from Afro Sheen commercials watching Soul Train :), but OTOH the Kamusi Project online English-Swahili dictionary gives "huruma" for humanity. Looking for possible alternatives like "community" didn't turn up anything looking like "ubuntu."
OTOH, if I remember rightly, Swahili is a Bantu lingua franca with borrowings from Arabic. Since Nbdele and Zulu are Bantu languages, there may well be a cognate in Swahili that I don't know how to find in the online dictionary, or that might not be in it yet.