Final note: [Accelerated C++] is one of the fantastic "C++ In-Depth" series, of which Stroustrup is the series editor. All are very high quality. One of the series' rules is that the main body of the book can be no more than 300 pages, so "make your point, make it simple, make it clear" rules the day.
How delightful! The length constraint means, from what I've seen at bookstores, that no book describing C++ itself can be part of the series. IMHO this says something about the language.
Not necessarily. If it's a third-party program that breaks, they'll get the heat, not MS...and MS hasn't been above intentionally breaking third-party software in the past, vide "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" and the bogus warning when running Windows atop DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS.
You've got to put a marketing spin on your project if you want people to use it. Always highlight and stress its features and strengths. Never advertise its weaknesses.
That darned honesty...it just gets in the way of good marketing, I guess.
Better still, rather than teaching kids the computer equivalent of rote formula plugging, how about actually teaching them about computing so that they aren't tied to a particular system?
OK...the insolation constant is 1394 watts/m**2. Fortunately you're not talking about a laptop; the lightweight photocells are 15-20% efficient. Heavier ones are around 35% efficient, so let's ignore the monitor for now and say you run with a 350W power supply. That comes to around a square meter of photocells...unless you want your system to be up when it's overcast, or at night...and we didn't worry about your latitude or seasonal changes in insolation.
I'm probably echoing what others have said already, but...
Isaac Asimov is your friend. Realm of {Numbers, Algebra}, the Understanding Physics series, collections of his F&SF essays sorted by subject matter.
Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million is a classic work of mathematics for nonspecialists; it will take you up through the calculus and into probability theory.
An Indian mathematician named Jagjit Singh wrote various books on aspects of math and science; I remember best one that dealt with error-correcting codes. Alas, checking the Dover Publications web site shows only Great Ideas of Modern Mathematics still in print, but evidently one can find used copies of others (e.g. Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics) online.
Dover also prints The Strange Story of the Quantum, which does a nice job of taking you from the whole brouhaha over black body radiation and the "violet catastrophe" through Planck, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg.
While we're talking about quanta, check out Richard Feynmann's QED, and his other works for the general public.
Those are getting on a bit in years; I'm not aware of a good introduction to topology or algebra (in the sense of monoids, groups, rings, etc.) or category theory for the general public, but with luck others will.
Sorry, but that's been going on for a long time now. I have astigmatism, and probably would've fallen prey to an unseen foe a few thousand years ago. Cars and motorcycles are preventing the weeding out of those who can't run fast, and just anybody can move a lot of stuff with a fork lift.
How do you know you aren't subject to the same constraints? (People used to argue that Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem somehow showed AI to be impossible, but OTOH "Anonymous Coward cannot consistently assert this proposition" is clearly true and you can't assert it, despite your supposed superiority.) Humans are systems, too, and eventually we'll figure out how we work. If things go as they have in the past, the simplicity of the underlying mechanism should be breathtaking--and humans will be no less impressive, or deserving of ethical treatment, for that simplicity.
I use Mozilla, but damn is it slow for even the most mundane of pages. If you want to load a plugin, forget it. I'm running a 1.3GHz Athelon with 512MB of RAM and it gets bad.
Eh? I'm typing this on a system with an 800 MHz Duron, and Mozilla doesn't seem slow to me.
Nope...The French concern for the purity of la belle langue francaise goes back well before the "freedom fries" brouhaha. Rene Etiemble wrote Parlez-Vous Franglais? back in 1964, and according to this page, similar opinions had been voiced by Frenchmen as far back as 1757.
I hasten to add that for a long time, French was the language of philosophy, science, mathematics, belles lettres, and diplomacy...but when it comes to this whole "linguistic purity" thing, give it up. (Hey...King Canute wasn't French.)
(Note to Francophones: I tried to put the appropriate diacritical marks in, but/.'s software kept me from doing so.)
If you don't understand that each country has its own culture, and that its culture is not the american one, you should go back to school asap.
I recall reading that the French post offices used to stamp letters addressed in Breton "Addresse en Breton interdite" and return them to the sender. Great respect for culture, that.
I couldn't say whether most other languages are as paranoid about purity as French. Mario Pei writes about similar attempts at linguistic purity in Fascist Italy, which had linguists chuckling in some cases because the proposed replacements weren't really Italian (he gave "albergo" for hotel as an example). Icelandic has largely eschewed foreign borrowings, but I don't know whether that's from any notion of fending off supposed cultural hegemony or not.
Japanese borrow words from other languages with the same reckless abandon as English. Some example garaigo: terebi (television), biiru (beer), baikingu ("Viking," but meaning smorgasbord), and one near and dear to/.ers, anime. "Karaoke" is a compound including a garaigo, "oke" (orchestra). They're not all from English: the Portuguese traders who visited Japan left words behind (e.g. "pan," bread) and of course the Japanese borrowed a lot of words (or at least pronunciations) from Chinese, not to mention the ideographs.
Yes, we've heard of/read them. For that matter, we've listened to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Ian and Sylvia, Rush, and Liona Boyd, and having done so, it's that much harder to understand why Canadian broadcasters evidently have to be forced under penalty of law to include Canadian content.
As long as government has sufficient power to make it worth buying politicians, politicians will be bought. Want to get rid of that preferential treatment? Restrict the government to its proper functions.
"The reason just English is because that as much as we hate it, we are in the minority of language users..."
For now, let's ignore the reasons why e-voting is a bad idea, i.e. the vastly greater opportunities for coercion or bribing of voters. We're talking about the potential to disenfranchise people based on their choice of operating system, and that is fundamentally wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Final note: [Accelerated C++] is one of the fantastic "C++ In-Depth" series, of which Stroustrup is the series editor. All are very high quality. One of the series' rules is that the main body of the book can be no more than 300 pages, so "make your point, make it simple, make it clear" rules the day.
How delightful! The length constraint means, from what I've seen at bookstores, that no book describing C++ itself can be part of the series. IMHO this says something about the language.
Not necessarily. If it's a third-party program that breaks, they'll get the heat, not MS...and MS hasn't been above intentionally breaking third-party software in the past, vide "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" and the bogus warning when running Windows atop DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS.
I worked briefly as a spammer, but then lost my income as a result of an anti-spam hacker with a chip on his shoulder.
We pause now for any expressions of sympathy.
(Crickets chirp.)
You've got to put a marketing spin on your project if you want people to use it. Always highlight and stress its features and strengths. Never advertise its weaknesses.
That darned honesty...it just gets in the way of good marketing, I guess.
Well, maybe because the XFree team isn't interested in anything except improving graphics drivers?
If that were the case, wouldn't the Gatos Project have been integrated into XFree86 long ago?
Better still, rather than teaching kids the computer equivalent of rote formula plugging, how about actually teaching them about computing so that they aren't tied to a particular system?
OK...the insolation constant is 1394 watts/m**2. Fortunately you're not talking about a laptop; the lightweight photocells are 15-20% efficient. Heavier ones are around 35% efficient, so let's ignore the monitor for now and say you run with a 350W power supply. That comes to around a square meter of photocells...unless you want your system to be up when it's overcast, or at night...and we didn't worry about your latitude or seasonal changes in insolation.
Nowhere in the submission was it claimed that Taylor said Open Source is a cancer; read it more closely.
...bad disco...
Redundancy alert!
- Isaac Asimov is your friend. Realm of {Numbers, Algebra}, the Understanding Physics series, collections of his F&SF essays sorted by subject matter.
- Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million is a classic work of mathematics for nonspecialists; it will take you up through the calculus and into probability theory.
- An Indian mathematician named Jagjit Singh wrote various books on aspects of math and science; I remember best one that dealt with error-correcting codes. Alas, checking the Dover Publications web site shows only Great Ideas of Modern Mathematics still in print, but evidently one can find used copies of others (e.g. Great Ideas in Information Theory, Language and Cybernetics) online.
- Dover also prints The Strange Story of the Quantum, which does a nice job of taking you from the whole brouhaha over black body radiation and the "violet catastrophe" through Planck, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg.
- While we're talking about quanta, check out Richard Feynmann's QED, and his other works for the general public.
Those are getting on a bit in years; I'm not aware of a good introduction to topology or algebra (in the sense of monoids, groups, rings, etc.) or category theory for the general public, but with luck others will.Sorry, but that's been going on for a long time now. I have astigmatism, and probably would've fallen prey to an unseen foe a few thousand years ago. Cars and motorcycles are preventing the weeding out of those who can't run fast, and just anybody can move a lot of stuff with a fork lift.
How do you know you aren't subject to the same constraints? (People used to argue that Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem somehow showed AI to be impossible, but OTOH "Anonymous Coward cannot consistently assert this proposition" is clearly true and you can't assert it, despite your supposed superiority.) Humans are systems, too, and eventually we'll figure out how we work. If things go as they have in the past, the simplicity of the underlying mechanism should be breathtaking--and humans will be no less impressive, or deserving of ethical treatment, for that simplicity.
Can you prove it didn't happen?
---Criswell, Plan Nine from Outer Space
Just how can one possibly perform such an audit? By definition, proprietary software vendors will not release their source to allow it.
I use Mozilla, but damn is it slow for even the most mundane of pages. If you want to load a plugin, forget it. I'm running a 1.3GHz Athelon with 512MB of RAM and it gets bad.
Eh? I'm typing this on a system with an 800 MHz Duron, and Mozilla doesn't seem slow to me.
Nope...The French concern for the purity of la belle langue francaise goes back well before the "freedom fries" brouhaha. Rene Etiemble wrote Parlez-Vous Franglais? back in 1964, and according to this page, similar opinions had been voiced by Frenchmen as far back as 1757.
/.'s software kept me from doing so.)
I hasten to add that for a long time, French was the language of philosophy, science, mathematics, belles lettres, and diplomacy...but when it comes to this whole "linguistic purity" thing, give it up. (Hey...King Canute wasn't French.)
(Note to Francophones: I tried to put the appropriate diacritical marks in, but
If you don't understand that each country has its own culture, and that its culture is not the american one, you should go back to school asap.
I recall reading that the French post offices used to stamp letters addressed in Breton "Addresse en Breton interdite" and return them to the sender. Great respect for culture, that.
I couldn't say whether most other languages are as paranoid about purity as French. Mario Pei writes about similar attempts at linguistic purity in Fascist Italy, which had linguists chuckling in some cases because the proposed replacements weren't really Italian (he gave "albergo" for hotel as an example). Icelandic has largely eschewed foreign borrowings, but I don't know whether that's from any notion of fending off supposed cultural hegemony or not.
/.ers, anime. "Karaoke" is a compound including a garaigo, "oke" (orchestra). They're not all from English: the Portuguese traders who visited Japan left words behind (e.g. "pan," bread) and of course the Japanese borrowed a lot of words (or at least pronunciations) from Chinese, not to mention the ideographs.
Japanese borrow words from other languages with the same reckless abandon as English. Some example garaigo: terebi (television), biiru (beer), baikingu ("Viking," but meaning smorgasbord), and one near and dear to
Yes, we've heard of/read them. For that matter, we've listened to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Ian and Sylvia, Rush, and Liona Boyd, and having done so, it's that much harder to understand why Canadian broadcasters evidently have to be forced under penalty of law to include Canadian content.
Most systems now come with "image restore" disks instead of installation disks for software piracry reasons.
I thought that MS's software activation was supposed to take care of that.
As long as government has sufficient power to make it worth buying politicians, politicians will be bought. Want to get rid of that preferential treatment? Restrict the government to its proper functions.
I agree, we're not talking ten minutes, but...
Surely a well-designed program would have the system-specific parts of the UI isolated so that it would not be hard to do a port?
Come on. The monopoly is on OSs, not on browsers. Again, you're being disingenuous.
Let's change that around a little:
"The reason just English is because that as much as we hate it, we are in the minority of language users..."
For now, let's ignore the reasons why e-voting is a bad idea, i.e. the vastly greater opportunities for coercion or bribing of voters. We're talking about the potential to disenfranchise people based on their choice of operating system, and that is fundamentally wrong.
I'm impressed by the sheer density of disingenuousnesss in this post.
You make money from giving something away when doing so protects your monopoly.
Some bands cannot survive outside a studio because members need audio sweetening, dubbed-over voice tracks and other tricks to sound presentable.
Or, more bluntly, the musically incompetent can't pull it off because it requires actual performance. Somehow I can't muster much sympathy.
(That said, some respectable musicians do make music in ways that are hard to pull off live. They won't be able to do this.)