There is such a thing as bad publicity, and you can very easily help end this.
Call your local dealerships and tell them that though you're a loyal Toyota customer, as a result of the Amber Duick situation and the way corporate has pretended there's nothing wrong with the situation, you apologize, but you cannot in good conscience remain a Toyota customer. Be polite, and be prepared to explain and to provide reference.
Then call Toyota and do the same. Toyota's toll free is 800-331-4331, and extension 5 is specifically dedicated to telling Toyota about experiences you've had with their company.
Tie up each call with "if Toyota were to publically apologize, release Saatchi and Saatchi from advertising and release Chad Harp from spokesmanship, I would be able to believe that this was a temporary oversight. As long as the company and individual who allowed this to happen retain their positions, I must conclude that Toyota believes that fake stalking by a man on the run from the law claiming to be ready to show up at the customer's home is an appropriate marketing behavior, and I cannot do business with you again."
Ask that the dealerships contact corporate and explain that they're losing customers as a result of Toyota believing that it's appropriate to pretend to stalk their customers.
They'll listen if they think their bottom line is at risk.
Creationism isn't tied to Christianity, there are several religions that teach it.
Sorry, no. Creationism is a term that was created recently to describe a political movement by religious people to clothe their Christianity as alternative scientific belief for the explicit purpose of getting it taught under diversity principles in schools. The word does not mean "all forms of religious belief which involve a divine origin viewpoint."
Just because you assume a word to mean something does not make it so. Please don't correct people based on guesses you made from context. Language isn't a "no you're wrong" guessing game.
Creationism isn't just explicitly Christian, it's also explicitly American.
It's particularly telling that the subtitle contains misused words; to stupefy is to shock someone to the point that they are temporarily unable to speak. Only a web dictionary confused about the word "dumb" would lead to a mistake like that.
Maybe the author should spend less time spinning suspicions into novels, without data. That they're apparently a journalist is somewhat concerning.
All of those are electromechanical, not electronic.
The first three are. The Wurlitzer and Rhodes are subject to argument. The clavinet and pianet are clearly electronic.
Moog also never ventured beyond oscillator circuitry
Er, yes, he did.
Kurzweil used samples as a basis
Kurtzweil didn't invent that either, although you're correct to raise it as a topic I had neglected. Again, this is the subject of definition; sampling was in use by Edison himself, way back in the wax cylinder era, though he used it to the effect of comedy and sound effects in his cast-shadow filmmaking, rather than for music. That's okay, though, because there was an entire musical movement around sampling called "Musique Concrete" that started in 1939 and ended in 1946, build around the practice of splicing audio tape to create music. For reference, Kurtzweil was born in 1949.
Hammond famously had recordings on their pedals and pulls in their late 1960s organs, used frequently to great effect in late hippie music. The 1970s versions of organs made this a commonality around electronics; watch a Captain and Tenille video some time. Kurtzweil did not release his first keyboard until 1982, at which point quite a few vendors had sampling keyboards in place.
Indeed, I think Casio might have already released the first Casiotone to take realtime samples from a microphone and apply them to keys by then, but I'm not certain and am unable to find reference.
and while the sampler was invented earlier (being big and horribly expensive), none of those systems used ROMs.
Wait, you're saying he's a world class innovator because he switched storage media?
Incidentally, many cheap electronic keyboards used ROM for their sample storage by the early 1980s; I'm not sure why you thought Kurzweil was the first to do this. The transition wasn't an invention issue; it was a matter of cost. You see it starting in higher end Yamaha hardware initially.
His invention beat Roland, Yamaha, Alesis, E-mu and Korg who came up with sample-based keyboards several years later (1988 and onwards).
I'm really not sure what to say here. Two of those companies didn't exist when Kurzweil released. You're simply incorrect about Yamaha; they responded to Fairlight in 1981, the year before Kurzweil got started, but their hardware was fantastically expensive and as such rare.
Kurzweil's "invention" was beaten to the market by in fact quite a few people, one of which you even mention yourself - the Fairlight, which was on the market three years before Kurzweil moved into music at all. If your list are excluded because they were beaten to it, so was Kurzweil.
You're also forgetting a bunch of other groups who were already in that space, such as Synclavier IIx from 1980. And neither of these did anything that the Mellotron or the Chamberlain didn't do in the 1950s; it's just that those devices worked from tape.
There is no invention in Kurzweil's hands here, no matter how you look at it. The reason Kurzweil won is simple: he had manufacturing contacts from his earlier business experience with Xerox that allowed him to lower the cost of making his devices, and out-competed on cost.
Kurzweil is to innovation in music what Woolworth's is to innovation in market economics: a footnote who found a way to make things cheap and accessable, and was quickly beaten right the hell back out of the market when the more established forces regrouped.
Kurzweil's work is still in use, too - Kurzweil Music Systems continues to exist as a company
There are still open Woolworths', too. It's been a long time since either one has been considered a major player in any way.
Look, nobody calls Korg a world class scientist, do they? Kurzweil is no Lev Landau.
I've often wondered why people believe this, given that his reading machine wasn't particularly revolutionary at the time, and given that nobody seems to be able to think of anything else he did for computer science. He's a hell of a science fiction author, as evidenced by his Singularity, which has no basis in empirical logic, and which has smoothly shifted from its original near-guarantee of 1985 to its current 2050, by which time he will no longer be alive to adjust it again to 2076. The science, though, it turns out is quite a bit more difficult to locate.
maybe even the invention of -- the electronic musical keyboard.
Depending on how you define electronic keyboard, this will be Lloyd Loar in 1919, Hammond in 1920, Martenot in 1928, Bechstein in 1929, Miessner in 1931, Wurlitzer in 1955, Rhodes in 1965 or the competing Clavinet and Pianet from 1967.
Yes, it is commonly remarked that Kurtzweil invented synthesized sound, but that's also false; Moog beat him to the punch by ten years, and Moog's work is still in use, whereas Kurtzweil's is not.
Kurtzweil's most compelling invention is his history as an inventor.
Are we looking at a future where we not only have to download updates to fix bugs in our applications and operating systems, but our hardware as well?
No, we're looking at a past like that. Lest you forget, both the 486 and the Pentium had firmware updates too (the Pentium FDIV bug being the better remembered of the two.) My first firmware update was a bugfix in a 300 baud accoustic coupler, way back in 1983 or thereabouts.
Can't imagine why you think this is anything new; even video game consoles have been doing this for ten years now.
No, it makes them the biggest purchaser and stockpiler. Not the biggest user. Enormous difference. But go on, keep quoting the CEO of the American Petroleum Institude, Red Cavaney. It's not like he, as CEO of ConecoPhillips, was the primary architect of Bush's eight year campaign of lies about the nature of petroleum, nor is it the case that Bush regularly told lies about the military to generate support he desired.
But I suppose knowing the first thing about the source you're citing is too much to ask from an argumentative SlashDot nobody these days. He was, by the way, also involved with the Enron energy scandal, and helped architect the Walker v. Cheney oil scandal.
Also you should ask WalMart about how to treat minimum wage people.
Incidentally, just because something is of strategic value and is being purchased as such doesn't mean that it's being burned as fuel.
Now, I don't mean to scare you, but I did a little bit of basic research. For one, the number you get when reading around varies about 700%; that page alone lets it vary by 120%, and NPR cites the number as about 40% lower. For two, the number cited is 340,000 barrels per day (roughly the output of two mid-sized offshore drilling rigs) during an active two nation war, whereas the American public consumes 20,800,000 billion barrels per day, loding the military at 1.6 percent of the nation's usage.
You know, the nation served by six gas companies.
CNOOC just bought a 75 billion barrel a year contract from Marathon - three and a half times America's total consumption, and more than 50 times what the military uses. Neither of those are particularly big, as far as oil companies go.
So yeah, the military is the biggest buyer of light refined oil, because the oil companies buy rights, and everyone else buys gasoline or crude. You just have to phrase scale very carefully, and ignore the blatantly obvious lie you're telling.
To give you a sense of scale, USPIRG - a far more reliable source of information about oil than an oil executive - suggests that public bus transportation in New York City alone suppressed the use of 1.8 billion gallons of oil versus what cars would have used. That's nearly fourteen times what the entire military used just saved by busses in one city.
If you really, genuinely believe that the US military is the world's largest oil buyer, you need to take off the blinders. It's the largest single purchaser of unprocessed light refined oil who doesn't deal in futures, and the only reason they don't deal in futures is that they cannot tolerage shortages. Of course they're the world's largest buyer of light refined oil - the only other people with the facilities to process it into something usable are the sellers.
That's a little bit like saying that a grocery store chain is the largest purchaser of beef because McDonalds buys hamburger instead.
My Palm 1000 from 1996 invalidates the claims in this patent through prior art. I seem to remember the Apple Newton being touchscreen too, but I didn't have one, so I'm not sure.
An art film isn't a film that is artistic. Please don't confuse what I actually said with something you'd like to make a point with which by disagreeing. I never said they aren't art. Removing words from sentences is disingenuous in the extreme.
Also, I'd find hilarious any attempt to define art that both includes a Pixar film and actually excludes basically anything ever. It's not art just because it's well made, enjoyable and pretty, and certainly not because you want to defend it and know how to spell 'snob'.
Since you'd like to challenge my "snobby definition", as if it's something I defined, I'd be curious what your definition was, as if it were something you defined. Given that people who actually know things about art - you know, those who went to school for it and know basically anything about its history - can't even agree on whether Andy Warhol or Cristo or Yoko Ono's work are art, I think maybe you'll find this more difficult than you expect. (In particular you'll have a hard time finding anyone who's got a better education in the arts than reading Wikipedia who will take seriously the idea that art can be made by a team of thousands, or can have its core and constituent nature - in this case the script - altered to prevent offending corporate relations and still remain art. You might as well put sports jersies on American Gothic, then claim the message is unaltered. It's absurd.)
Do you have a legitimate definition of art which includes Wall-E, which is backed up by essentially anything beyond your imagination, and which doesn't include certain other things which obviously aren't art, like most teenage-oriented summer comedies?
Or are you going to tell me that American Pie and Borat are also art, and thereby fall off of the being-taken-seriously radar?
Honestly I wonder what purpose people like you think they're serving by stuffing anything they enjoy into a word which isn't even about quality. Being art isn't being good; lots of art is outright crap, and well understood to be so by both the artist and the community, yet still heralded as important art.
Basquiat's work is a prime example; he's widely considered one of the greatest street artists of all time, and yet all he actually did was spray paint slogans on public walls. Nothing even particularly interesting.
Why do you think you're in any position to discuss the issue? It's not like you've taken any classes, read any books on the topic, et cetera. (Don't pretend you have; you'd be no more convincing than Palin was about politics, or than Schildt is about C++.)
Respectfully, that Hooked On a Feeling commercial was the subject of significant conversation in my highschool in 1996, while we all tried to find out who Blue Suede was. It is at least that old. I seem to remember it being older, but cannot find authoritative reference.
An art film isn't a film that is artistic. Please don't confuse what I actually said with something you'd like to make a point with which by disagreeing.
Pixar's first twenty seven paying jobs were commercials; the only two you remember are the packs of life savers doing a conga line and the listerine bottle Tarzanning around to Hooked on a Feeling.
Pixar's first three movies were Disney contracts for things they didn't write; one of them is a sequel, Toy Story 2 (to their Toy Story 1, with A Bug's Life inbetween).
Of their next three films, only two are sequels; they are Toy Story 3 and Cars 2. The story linked thinks that Monsters Inc. 2 is among the next three; it is not. It will be preceded by The Bear And The Bow, as well as by Newt.
Indeed, more worrying than that they're sequels is that one of the three isn't in-house written; that's Toy Story 3, and we all know what a pile TS2 was.
The vast bulk of Pixar's work is commercial in nature. None of their films are art films; they're all carefully concocted, demographically targetted Disney style family fun factory output.
Can't imagine why anyone would think that Pixar is just now becoming money oriented. You don't shell out for Tom Hanks as a cartoon voice actor if you're not looking for wallet padding; they hired him for his name, not the quality of his work (he's a fine actor, but doesn't have nearly the range of some of the well established voice actors out there, the same of which can be said for most of Pixar's other voice staff.)
That said, the code doing the searching for Orbitz uses algorithms and architectural techniques that would take so much more "scaffolding" in C++ that it would not only hamper maintenance of the code, it would likely hamper innovation and invention of new algorithms and functionality.
This seems to be a favorite claim of LISP type people. I've never seen an actual example of a LISP framework needing less arbitrary scaffolding, though, that was anything even remotely convincing.
Indeed, that the C++ datastructure and algorithm system would be so much radically simpler makes it quite likely the other way around.
Listen, I've been clear that I'd like to take a swing at this. As long as you're just making abstract arbitrary claims about how hard it is, there's nothing I can do to disprove things to you (which seems, again, to be generally the way LISP people like things.) But if you take a look at the real world implementations of complex algorithmic systems, C++ implementations are typically on the order of one third or less the total physical size.
Don't get so wrapped up in LISP's supposed superiority. It always comes down to vague handwaving about scaffolding. If the system is so difficult and complex, the "scaffolding" is a vanishingly tiny portion of the actual code. Give me a LISP system you think is intractable in C++, and I will take the time to change your mind.
Gendo, gendo, how can you take over Japan, then reinvent humanity, then think that a search over 250 gigapoints is a large space? Look into tree culling algorithms: since this isn't actually a graph search but a tree search (because fare cycles are nonsense), you can cut that space down enormously. Given that almost the entire search is branch factor, it's quite likely that a sophisticated implementation would search less than a hundred thousand nodes.
I'm going to say it again: this is not a complex problem. Not even close.
Remember that this work used to require dedicated intelligence (i.e. a travel agent)
So did the work that's now done by spreadsheet. What's your point?
1) Nobody is being identified as CoS. The comparison is ridiculous and specious on its face. However, I can understand how Scientologists wouldn't want people to know who they were.
2) CoS is being removed from a private site with limited reach (admittedly an important one), but this in no way affects them outside that site. This is no more "censorship" than would be being removed from the golf course that senators play at.
3) CoS is being removed for a pattern of poor behavior of editing things in their interest, without providing appropriate sources, removing well sourced material, in the hopes of changing their public image. Each of these is against Wikipedia's stated policy, and the group was warned more than a dozen times over the course of several years.
They are merely Godwinning so that they don't have to accept that what happened to them is the result of their organized campaign of unethical behavior (as were it any surprise, given their other activities.)
Despite the other issues with Orbitz, QPX is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by highly skilled LISP programmers - an exceedingly fast, flexible, and successful search algorithm that they have been able to maintain as the industry leader since it's invention over twelve years ago.
You seem to have missed the point entirely. Nobody said LISP wasn't powerful enough to express complex algorithms. (I'd be interested to learn what industry you think is being led by ITA, though; the Orbitz engine would be lightning fast using simple iterated A* and a creative distance metric.)
As far as your assessment of "Orbitz is ridiculously slow for the amount of data it processes" I beg to differ. Having worked for ITA in the past, let me tell you the amount of data searched through is staggering, especially when you consider that that data set is updated continuously, in nearly-real-time (I could claim real-time, but I like being accurate)
It shouldn't be. Fares just aren't that complex. It's a straightforward directed graph. Your fare search should be several orders of magnitude cheaper than Google Maps' generating a driving path from Boston to Los Angeles, yet Google Maps is done in under a second and Orbitz typically takes 20+ seconds.
If you used to work for ITA, contact me in private and help me understand algorithm context. I used to write Gameboy Color games; you don't know anyone who squeezes speed like I do. There may be a profitable contracting endeavour which we could split 50/50.
Let's be clear: if you have ten thousand airline vendors offering each one hundred thousand flights per day, most staggered across gates, and you need to satisfy group constraints like having N minutes between connections so that someone can travel between terminals, and you have seating constraints and time constraints, and on top of that you have to make fare and time balanced searches - and that's way, way more data than an orbitz fare search should need - you should still be clocking in around one tenth of a second of cpu time.
I'm going to say it again: I have set upper bounds that are unrealistic given the real world commercial environment (there's no way there are that many airlines making that many flights), and I still openly reject the claim that the processing time here is in any way reasonable.
Talk to me. If you can set up contact and communicate the problem constraints to me, we can package benchmarks of a replacement with that Google paper about one second delay causing 40% traffic loss, and make ourselves a nice little pile of money.
Lisp fans always claim this, but I think it's a red herring.
It's not a red herring, it's just too difficult for any of the people who crow about it to actually do. The testing tool Heckle gets great mileage out of this quality in Ruby, and I'm doing my best to reproduce it in Erlang.
TCL takes the same principle even further, and it's nowhere near as popular or admired.
I know of zero companies hiring Lisp programmers in the Seattle area (and I've looked!).
Er, yeah that was kind of my original point, about LISP being dead. It's easier to find 16-bit Visual Basic jobs, FFS. Seriously: try looking for that.
If you were a halfway decent business
I own several, actually, two of them in software development. And they're more than halfway decent. LISP isn't generally applicable to any of our problem domains (hosting, gaming, iPhone applications, Flash applications, ad serving.)
But I'm sure if I don't hire LISPers, my several businesses that you know nothing about must all be trash. (With an attitude like that, it's amazing to me you're employed in development at all.)
you could have a couple dozen really great Lispers just for the asking.
I'm a LISPer, actually. Funny how you discount that possibility. Also, many of the people I employ are LISPers. None of them write lisp at work, even though they're allowed to use any language for which there is an industrial quality implementation at a reasonable price, of which there are several for LISP. Several of them use Arc or Clojure, though very rarely. I'm unaware of any private projects going on in LISP at the moment, and I'd like to think I know my staff well enough that I know most of their projects, but it's possible I'm missing a few.
I haven't written LISP in years. It isn't useful when you know other languages.
Everything you say argues against the live-ness or viability of LISP in the modern era, except when you point to things that aren't LISP and curl them in by "is a lisp". C++, Objective C, D, Concurrent C, Java by way of Elm, C# and so on are all descendants of C, but if you pick any ten projects, you'd be lucky to find one whose natural implementation across any two of those is even similar.
It's as absurd as asserting characteristics of America based on its being an England.
And Objective-C is a Smalltalk, and Erlang is a Prolog, and Fortress is a Fortran, and etc. Indeed, in the exact same way that Clojure is a LISP, C++ templates are a LISP. If I had told him to move to C++, would you have said "C++ is a Lisp?" No: development in them is typically radically different.
And they're all turing equivalent.
You'll notice in another branch of this thread, I admonish someone that if they really need something lisp like, that they should move to a modern lisp, and gave a list of them including Clojure.
Try re-reading what I said as if I knew Clojure's pedigree. Still makes sense.
Incidentally, in discussions of language expressiveness, it's inappropriate to class 60-year descendant languages as the same as their parent languages. It'd be like arguing for the power of BCPL, then saying "omg C++ is a BCPL". Working in Clojure is a fundamentally different thing than working in LISP. For the same reason, I work in C++ but would not consider working in C or B; I work in ECMA but would not consider working in LiveScript; I work in Erlang but would not consider working in Prolog; I work in Clojure, but I would not consider working in LISP.
LISP is nowhere near as expressive as Clojure. I would not pan Clojure; its usage is already almost caught up to LISP's, and for a damned good reason.
Clojure is a LISP in the way that Islam is a Zoroastrianism. Heredity is not equivalence; if you spoke other languages you might be better equipped to understand that kind of novice error.
Funny how you're using polymorphism to make your argument. And botching it.
No, and no. It takes more than that to parse real HTTP messages, and that's assumeing you are using a sane string API (string.h, does not count IMNSHO).
I've written a fully HTTP 1.0 compliant webserver in C in 518 lines, using nothing other than the C and C++ standard libraries. Saying it isn't possible just means you don't know the difference between "can't" and "don't know how".
You were the one who wanted a challenge. It's trivial to do; nweb is only 201 lines of code and it's HTTP 1.1 compliant. I can't imagine why you think it isn't possible just because you don't know how. For all the guff you seem to want to talk about how awesome you are in C/C++, you seem to be unable to actually accomplish relatively straightforward things.
But then nginx, lighttpd, thttpd and even and-httpd should all be competitive if not outright beat YAWS (depending on what you test, the CPU and network speed).
I cannot imagine under what fantasy this seems reasonable to you. YAWS spanks every one of those webservers; its only real competition in production is LightStreamer. You've never actually benchmarked any of these, have you? Just speculating, aren't you?
Then there's Tux aka. Red Hat Content Accelerator, and it just doesn't get faster than that
And you believe this why?
... for obvious reasons
Which is handwave for "I have no idea what I'm talking about but really wish I did." I assume you think that anything running inside the OS must somehow by definition be faster than something running as an application outside the OS, which is laughably naive regarding where the actual limits in server scaling are.
Until you have some idea how replacing a timeslicer would affect an application, you have no idea what you're talking about. No large scaling webserver uses the Linux (or for that matter the Windows) timeslicer; their design is aimed for a more general case usage. I'd be willing to bet you don't even know the growth rate of your scheduler. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn 1) that you have no idea what that phrase means, 2) that you think you do know what that phrase means, 3) that you can't understand why that's germane in a serving situation, and that 4) you're going to try to hold up this critical issue that you fail to understand as evidence of my failing to put together important pieces in the effort to cobble together an argument.
Which is hilariously common among people who run guess driven argument as if it were fact, as you're doing.
(I'm not even going to dignify your attempt to sound smart by dropping the wrong name for bandwidth caps as if it had anything to do with a discussion of webserver scaling. That's like mentioning gas tank size in engine fuel efficiency discussions: fundamentally retarded.)
IIRC you needed jumbo frames and 10Ge to start hitting Tux limits, a few years ago
You do not remember correctly. You should go look into PCI bandwidth to understand why people who actually do this stuff are currently laughing at you so hard.
If you respond - and I confess I'm not looking forward to such a thing - do us both the favor of not making any arguments based on "obvious reasons", what you may or may not remember correctly, "should"-driven guessing. It's kind of boring. Stick to what you know well enough that you can give numbers, actual growth rates, case examples, studies or actual benchmarks.
This speculation bullshit reeks of someone who's never even tried half the things they're discussing.
That you believe several books over the course of six years constitutes a resurgence, especially given the historic nature of the language, kind of goes a pretty long way towards proving my point about its nearly non-extant market share.
Don't get me wrong, I think LISP is a wonderful language. But, let's not do ourselves the disservice, please, of pretending that it's been a major player since the 1960s. If you look at the list of supposedly dead languages that majorly outpace LISP in real world usage measured either as new code or maintained code (eg Delphi, Clipper, Fortran, Cobol, PL/I, Ada, Forth, ANSI Pascal, Object Pascal, ColdFusion, pre-.NET ASP, all on both metrics) you get a clearer idea of where things actually stand.
If LISP is so amazing, and if LISP has first mover advantage over anything the average programmer has ever heard of, why is it so resoundingly a bit player?
There are downsides to LISP. Lots of them. Serious ones. It hasn't stayed this dead for 60 years because it's the tragic forgotten child of programming; every freshman who wants to sound educated thumps it at their first opportunity, frequently without ever having written a line (which is not to call you a freshman, just to point out how not-unknown it is.)
It's a little like SICP. If it's been that free, that well known and that easily accessable for 20 years, how come it's being discarded by the university that published it for curriculum, and how come its design principles are largely unseen even in the work of people who have read it?
There's a lot to be said for academic languages and academic exercises; they open our eyes to many new approaches to problems.
But don't kid yourself. They died for a reason. Why is it that all the supposedly awful languages and design strategies are dominant?
It's because they work. For all their warts, for all their maintenance problems, for all the infrastructure you have to write, they work.
New practical languages are occurring which adopt many of the lessons of LISP. Ruby got a lot of LISP's problems removed, though it's still got a lot of problems of its own; Haskell can say the same. Erlang's got most of those problems cleared up, and is a practical real world language for a lot of things.
But dude, if the most impressive thing you can find is the application of graph search to a complex web form with credit card processing that the typical college sophomore could throw together in about a month, I mean, I'm really not sure what to tell you. Orbitz is ridiculously slow for the amount of data it processes, its user interface is awful, it copes poorly with unexpected things like uncommon use of the browser back button, and I usually have to go to it first so that I can check everywhere else and then by the time I'm done everywhere else maybe Orbitz has finally finished its first search.
What Orbitz does that's impressive is their ability to negotiate ticket prices. I go there because they get the bottom dollar bid. If that's your idea of something you can hold up to show the success of LISP, I've got to ask you: why have you gotten down to rare occasional me-too projects as your shining beacon?
Yahoo! Stores was lisp too. (Note the past tense.)
Big whoop.
When it gets down to it, you should actually try writing something like that some time in LISP. Then try writing it in another language. It's not really all that different. It'll be maybe the dollar sign instead of the parentheses whose ink wears off on your keyboard, and the whatever other language you write will probably be somewhat bulkier (though if you're working in a language like Erlang, Haskell, Mozart-Oz or Forth, it'll be substantially shorter).
Meh. Ten extra letters to get a three line algorithm done. Trade that for real exceptions and a strong type system, and you've chosen C++. Trade that for the pi calculus (which is hella more expressive than the lambda, and typically completely foreign to the LISPers who preach syntax superiori
Slashdot Mirror
There is such a thing as bad publicity, and you can very easily help end this.
Call your local dealerships and tell them that though you're a loyal Toyota customer, as a result of the Amber Duick situation and the way corporate has pretended there's nothing wrong with the situation, you apologize, but you cannot in good conscience remain a Toyota customer. Be polite, and be prepared to explain and to provide reference.
Then call Toyota and do the same. Toyota's toll free is 800-331-4331, and extension 5 is specifically dedicated to telling Toyota about experiences you've had with their company.
Tie up each call with "if Toyota were to publically apologize, release Saatchi and Saatchi from advertising and release Chad Harp from spokesmanship, I would be able to believe that this was a temporary oversight. As long as the company and individual who allowed this to happen retain their positions, I must conclude that Toyota believes that fake stalking by a man on the run from the law claiming to be ready to show up at the customer's home is an appropriate marketing behavior, and I cannot do business with you again."
Ask that the dealerships contact corporate and explain that they're losing customers as a result of Toyota believing that it's appropriate to pretend to stalk their customers.
They'll listen if they think their bottom line is at risk.
Sorry, no. Creationism is a term that was created recently to describe a political movement by religious people to clothe their Christianity as alternative scientific belief for the explicit purpose of getting it taught under diversity principles in schools. The word does not mean "all forms of religious belief which involve a divine origin viewpoint."
Just because you assume a word to mean something does not make it so. Please don't correct people based on guesses you made from context. Language isn't a "no you're wrong" guessing game.
Creationism isn't just explicitly Christian, it's also explicitly American.
By this logic, creationism also isn't creationist.
(Preparing for trolling by people who don't get it and assume I must be defending creationism.)
It's particularly telling that the subtitle contains misused words; to stupefy is to shock someone to the point that they are temporarily unable to speak. Only a web dictionary confused about the word "dumb" would lead to a mistake like that.
Maybe the author should spend less time spinning suspicions into novels, without data. That they're apparently a journalist is somewhat concerning.
The first three are. The Wurlitzer and Rhodes are subject to argument. The clavinet and pianet are clearly electronic.
Er, yes, he did.
Kurtzweil didn't invent that either, although you're correct to raise it as a topic I had neglected. Again, this is the subject of definition; sampling was in use by Edison himself, way back in the wax cylinder era, though he used it to the effect of comedy and sound effects in his cast-shadow filmmaking, rather than for music. That's okay, though, because there was an entire musical movement around sampling called "Musique Concrete" that started in 1939 and ended in 1946, build around the practice of splicing audio tape to create music. For reference, Kurtzweil was born in 1949.
Hammond famously had recordings on their pedals and pulls in their late 1960s organs, used frequently to great effect in late hippie music. The 1970s versions of organs made this a commonality around electronics; watch a Captain and Tenille video some time. Kurtzweil did not release his first keyboard until 1982, at which point quite a few vendors had sampling keyboards in place.
Indeed, I think Casio might have already released the first Casiotone to take realtime samples from a microphone and apply them to keys by then, but I'm not certain and am unable to find reference.
Wait, you're saying he's a world class innovator because he switched storage media?
Incidentally, many cheap electronic keyboards used ROM for their sample storage by the early 1980s; I'm not sure why you thought Kurzweil was the first to do this. The transition wasn't an invention issue; it was a matter of cost. You see it starting in higher end Yamaha hardware initially.
I'm really not sure what to say here. Two of those companies didn't exist when Kurzweil released. You're simply incorrect about Yamaha; they responded to Fairlight in 1981, the year before Kurzweil got started, but their hardware was fantastically expensive and as such rare.
Kurzweil's "invention" was beaten to the market by in fact quite a few people, one of which you even mention yourself - the Fairlight, which was on the market three years before Kurzweil moved into music at all. If your list are excluded because they were beaten to it, so was Kurzweil.
You're also forgetting a bunch of other groups who were already in that space, such as Synclavier IIx from 1980. And neither of these did anything that the Mellotron or the Chamberlain didn't do in the 1950s; it's just that those devices worked from tape.
There is no invention in Kurzweil's hands here, no matter how you look at it. The reason Kurzweil won is simple: he had manufacturing contacts from his earlier business experience with Xerox that allowed him to lower the cost of making his devices, and out-competed on cost.
Kurzweil is to innovation in music what Woolworth's is to innovation in market economics: a footnote who found a way to make things cheap and accessable, and was quickly beaten right the hell back out of the market when the more established forces regrouped.
There are still open Woolworths', too. It's been a long time since either one has been considered a major player in any way.
Look, nobody calls Korg a world class scientist, do they? Kurzweil is no Lev Landau.
I've often wondered why people believe this, given that his reading machine wasn't particularly revolutionary at the time, and given that nobody seems to be able to think of anything else he did for computer science. He's a hell of a science fiction author, as evidenced by his Singularity, which has no basis in empirical logic, and which has smoothly shifted from its original near-guarantee of 1985 to its current 2050, by which time he will no longer be alive to adjust it again to 2076. The science, though, it turns out is quite a bit more difficult to locate.
Depending on how you define electronic keyboard, this will be Lloyd Loar in 1919, Hammond in 1920, Martenot in 1928, Bechstein in 1929, Miessner in 1931, Wurlitzer in 1955, Rhodes in 1965 or the competing Clavinet and Pianet from 1967.
Yes, it is commonly remarked that Kurtzweil invented synthesized sound, but that's also false; Moog beat him to the punch by ten years, and Moog's work is still in use, whereas Kurtzweil's is not.
Kurtzweil's most compelling invention is his history as an inventor.
No, we're looking at a past like that. Lest you forget, both the 486 and the Pentium had firmware updates too (the Pentium FDIV bug being the better remembered of the two.) My first firmware update was a bugfix in a 300 baud accoustic coupler, way back in 1983 or thereabouts.
Can't imagine why you think this is anything new; even video game consoles have been doing this for ten years now.
The copyright of machine generated work has been a matter of law for more than a hundred years.
If you think this is in any way open to debate, ask yourself who drew Toy Story.
No, it makes them the biggest purchaser and stockpiler. Not the biggest user. Enormous difference. But go on, keep quoting the CEO of the American Petroleum Institude, Red Cavaney. It's not like he, as CEO of ConecoPhillips, was the primary architect of Bush's eight year campaign of lies about the nature of petroleum, nor is it the case that Bush regularly told lies about the military to generate support he desired.
But I suppose knowing the first thing about the source you're citing is too much to ask from an argumentative SlashDot nobody these days. He was, by the way, also involved with the Enron energy scandal, and helped architect the Walker v. Cheney oil scandal.
Also you should ask WalMart about how to treat minimum wage people.
Incidentally, just because something is of strategic value and is being purchased as such doesn't mean that it's being burned as fuel.
Now, I don't mean to scare you, but I did a little bit of basic research. For one, the number you get when reading around varies about 700%; that page alone lets it vary by 120%, and NPR cites the number as about 40% lower. For two, the number cited is 340,000 barrels per day (roughly the output of two mid-sized offshore drilling rigs) during an active two nation war, whereas the American public consumes 20,800,000 billion barrels per day, loding the military at 1.6 percent of the nation's usage.
You know, the nation served by six gas companies.
CNOOC just bought a 75 billion barrel a year contract from Marathon - three and a half times America's total consumption, and more than 50 times what the military uses. Neither of those are particularly big, as far as oil companies go.
So yeah, the military is the biggest buyer of light refined oil, because the oil companies buy rights, and everyone else buys gasoline or crude. You just have to phrase scale very carefully, and ignore the blatantly obvious lie you're telling.
To give you a sense of scale, USPIRG - a far more reliable source of information about oil than an oil executive - suggests that public bus transportation in New York City alone suppressed the use of 1.8 billion gallons of oil versus what cars would have used. That's nearly fourteen times what the entire military used just saved by busses in one city.
If you really, genuinely believe that the US military is the world's largest oil buyer, you need to take off the blinders. It's the largest single purchaser of unprocessed light refined oil who doesn't deal in futures, and the only reason they don't deal in futures is that they cannot tolerage shortages. Of course they're the world's largest buyer of light refined oil - the only other people with the facilities to process it into something usable are the sellers.
That's a little bit like saying that a grocery store chain is the largest purchaser of beef because McDonalds buys hamburger instead.
Please be less gulliable.
Er, the military industrial complex uses very little oil, actually. Most of our military vehicles are electrical or biodiesel at this point.
My Palm 1000 from 1996 invalidates the claims in this patent through prior art. I seem to remember the Apple Newton being touchscreen too, but I didn't have one, so I'm not sure.
This isn't going anywhere.
An art film isn't a film that is artistic. Please don't confuse what I actually said with something you'd like to make a point with which by disagreeing. I never said they aren't art. Removing words from sentences is disingenuous in the extreme.
Also, I'd find hilarious any attempt to define art that both includes a Pixar film and actually excludes basically anything ever. It's not art just because it's well made, enjoyable and pretty, and certainly not because you want to defend it and know how to spell 'snob'.
Since you'd like to challenge my "snobby definition", as if it's something I defined, I'd be curious what your definition was, as if it were something you defined. Given that people who actually know things about art - you know, those who went to school for it and know basically anything about its history - can't even agree on whether Andy Warhol or Cristo or Yoko Ono's work are art, I think maybe you'll find this more difficult than you expect. (In particular you'll have a hard time finding anyone who's got a better education in the arts than reading Wikipedia who will take seriously the idea that art can be made by a team of thousands, or can have its core and constituent nature - in this case the script - altered to prevent offending corporate relations and still remain art. You might as well put sports jersies on American Gothic, then claim the message is unaltered. It's absurd.)
Do you have a legitimate definition of art which includes Wall-E, which is backed up by essentially anything beyond your imagination, and which doesn't include certain other things which obviously aren't art, like most teenage-oriented summer comedies?
Or are you going to tell me that American Pie and Borat are also art, and thereby fall off of the being-taken-seriously radar?
Honestly I wonder what purpose people like you think they're serving by stuffing anything they enjoy into a word which isn't even about quality. Being art isn't being good; lots of art is outright crap, and well understood to be so by both the artist and the community, yet still heralded as important art.
Basquiat's work is a prime example; he's widely considered one of the greatest street artists of all time, and yet all he actually did was spray paint slogans on public walls. Nothing even particularly interesting.
Why do you think you're in any position to discuss the issue? It's not like you've taken any classes, read any books on the topic, et cetera. (Don't pretend you have; you'd be no more convincing than Palin was about politics, or than Schildt is about C++.)
Just what, exactly, do you think art is?
Respectfully, that Hooked On a Feeling commercial was the subject of significant conversation in my highschool in 1996, while we all tried to find out who Blue Suede was. It is at least that old. I seem to remember it being older, but cannot find authoritative reference.
An art film isn't a film that is artistic. Please don't confuse what I actually said with something you'd like to make a point with which by disagreeing.
Pixar's first twenty seven paying jobs were commercials; the only two you remember are the packs of life savers doing a conga line and the listerine bottle Tarzanning around to Hooked on a Feeling.
Pixar's first three movies were Disney contracts for things they didn't write; one of them is a sequel, Toy Story 2 (to their Toy Story 1, with A Bug's Life inbetween).
Of their next three films, only two are sequels; they are Toy Story 3 and Cars 2. The story linked thinks that Monsters Inc. 2 is among the next three; it is not. It will be preceded by The Bear And The Bow, as well as by Newt.
Indeed, more worrying than that they're sequels is that one of the three isn't in-house written; that's Toy Story 3, and we all know what a pile TS2 was.
The vast bulk of Pixar's work is commercial in nature. None of their films are art films; they're all carefully concocted, demographically targetted Disney style family fun factory output.
Can't imagine why anyone would think that Pixar is just now becoming money oriented. You don't shell out for Tom Hanks as a cartoon voice actor if you're not looking for wallet padding; they hired him for his name, not the quality of his work (he's a fine actor, but doesn't have nearly the range of some of the well established voice actors out there, the same of which can be said for most of Pixar's other voice staff.)
This seems to be a favorite claim of LISP type people. I've never seen an actual example of a LISP framework needing less arbitrary scaffolding, though, that was anything even remotely convincing.
Indeed, that the C++ datastructure and algorithm system would be so much radically simpler makes it quite likely the other way around.
Listen, I've been clear that I'd like to take a swing at this. As long as you're just making abstract arbitrary claims about how hard it is, there's nothing I can do to disprove things to you (which seems, again, to be generally the way LISP people like things.) But if you take a look at the real world implementations of complex algorithmic systems, C++ implementations are typically on the order of one third or less the total physical size.
Don't get so wrapped up in LISP's supposed superiority. It always comes down to vague handwaving about scaffolding. If the system is so difficult and complex, the "scaffolding" is a vanishingly tiny portion of the actual code. Give me a LISP system you think is intractable in C++, and I will take the time to change your mind.
Gendo, gendo, how can you take over Japan, then reinvent humanity, then think that a search over 250 gigapoints is a large space? Look into tree culling algorithms: since this isn't actually a graph search but a tree search (because fare cycles are nonsense), you can cut that space down enormously. Given that almost the entire search is branch factor, it's quite likely that a sophisticated implementation would search less than a hundred thousand nodes.
I'm going to say it again: this is not a complex problem. Not even close.
So did the work that's now done by spreadsheet. What's your point?
There are three meaningful differences:
1) Nobody is being identified as CoS. The comparison is ridiculous and specious on its face. However, I can understand how Scientologists wouldn't want people to know who they were.
2) CoS is being removed from a private site with limited reach (admittedly an important one), but this in no way affects them outside that site. This is no more "censorship" than would be being removed from the golf course that senators play at.
3) CoS is being removed for a pattern of poor behavior of editing things in their interest, without providing appropriate sources, removing well sourced material, in the hopes of changing their public image. Each of these is against Wikipedia's stated policy, and the group was warned more than a dozen times over the course of several years.
They are merely Godwinning so that they don't have to accept that what happened to them is the result of their organized campaign of unethical behavior (as were it any surprise, given their other activities.)
Routing around in 3, 2...
You seem to have missed the point entirely. Nobody said LISP wasn't powerful enough to express complex algorithms. (I'd be interested to learn what industry you think is being led by ITA, though; the Orbitz engine would be lightning fast using simple iterated A* and a creative distance metric.)
It shouldn't be. Fares just aren't that complex. It's a straightforward directed graph. Your fare search should be several orders of magnitude cheaper than Google Maps' generating a driving path from Boston to Los Angeles, yet Google Maps is done in under a second and Orbitz typically takes 20+ seconds.
If you used to work for ITA, contact me in private and help me understand algorithm context. I used to write Gameboy Color games; you don't know anyone who squeezes speed like I do. There may be a profitable contracting endeavour which we could split 50/50.
Let's be clear: if you have ten thousand airline vendors offering each one hundred thousand flights per day, most staggered across gates, and you need to satisfy group constraints like having N minutes between connections so that someone can travel between terminals, and you have seating constraints and time constraints, and on top of that you have to make fare and time balanced searches - and that's way, way more data than an orbitz fare search should need - you should still be clocking in around one tenth of a second of cpu time.
I'm going to say it again: I have set upper bounds that are unrealistic given the real world commercial environment (there's no way there are that many airlines making that many flights), and I still openly reject the claim that the processing time here is in any way reasonable.
Talk to me. If you can set up contact and communicate the problem constraints to me, we can package benchmarks of a replacement with that Google paper about one second delay causing 40% traffic loss, and make ourselves a nice little pile of money.
My blog has my email address.
It's not a red herring, it's just too difficult for any of the people who crow about it to actually do. The testing tool Heckle gets great mileage out of this quality in Ruby, and I'm doing my best to reproduce it in Erlang.
That's because TCL is agonizing.
Of those four, only Nginx is for static content. I cannot imagine why you'd think otherwise of YAWS, htstub or lightstreamer.
Sorry, hit submit too early.
Er, yeah that was kind of my original point, about LISP being dead. It's easier to find 16-bit Visual Basic jobs, FFS. Seriously: try looking for that.
I own several, actually, two of them in software development. And they're more than halfway decent. LISP isn't generally applicable to any of our problem domains (hosting, gaming, iPhone applications, Flash applications, ad serving.)
But I'm sure if I don't hire LISPers, my several businesses that you know nothing about must all be trash. (With an attitude like that, it's amazing to me you're employed in development at all.)
I'm a LISPer, actually. Funny how you discount that possibility. Also, many of the people I employ are LISPers. None of them write lisp at work, even though they're allowed to use any language for which there is an industrial quality implementation at a reasonable price, of which there are several for LISP. Several of them use Arc or Clojure, though very rarely. I'm unaware of any private projects going on in LISP at the moment, and I'd like to think I know my staff well enough that I know most of their projects, but it's possible I'm missing a few.
I haven't written LISP in years. It isn't useful when you know other languages.
Everything you say argues against the live-ness or viability of LISP in the modern era, except when you point to things that aren't LISP and curl them in by "is a lisp". C++, Objective C, D, Concurrent C, Java by way of Elm, C# and so on are all descendants of C, but if you pick any ten projects, you'd be lucky to find one whose natural implementation across any two of those is even similar.
It's as absurd as asserting characteristics of America based on its being an England.
And Objective-C is a Smalltalk, and Erlang is a Prolog, and Fortress is a Fortran, and etc. Indeed, in the exact same way that Clojure is a LISP, C++ templates are a LISP. If I had told him to move to C++, would you have said "C++ is a Lisp?" No: development in them is typically radically different.
And they're all turing equivalent.
You'll notice in another branch of this thread, I admonish someone that if they really need something lisp like, that they should move to a modern lisp, and gave a list of them including Clojure.
Try re-reading what I said as if I knew Clojure's pedigree. Still makes sense.
Incidentally, in discussions of language expressiveness, it's inappropriate to class 60-year descendant languages as the same as their parent languages. It'd be like arguing for the power of BCPL, then saying "omg C++ is a BCPL". Working in Clojure is a fundamentally different thing than working in LISP. For the same reason, I work in C++ but would not consider working in C or B; I work in ECMA but would not consider working in LiveScript; I work in Erlang but would not consider working in Prolog; I work in Clojure, but I would not consider working in LISP.
LISP is nowhere near as expressive as Clojure. I would not pan Clojure; its usage is already almost caught up to LISP's, and for a damned good reason.
Clojure is a LISP in the way that Islam is a Zoroastrianism. Heredity is not equivalence; if you spoke other languages you might be better equipped to understand that kind of novice error.
Funny how you're using polymorphism to make your argument. And botching it.
I've written a fully HTTP 1.0 compliant webserver in C in 518 lines, using nothing other than the C and C++ standard libraries. Saying it isn't possible just means you don't know the difference between "can't" and "don't know how".
You were the one who wanted a challenge. It's trivial to do; nweb is only 201 lines of code and it's HTTP 1.1 compliant. I can't imagine why you think it isn't possible just because you don't know how. For all the guff you seem to want to talk about how awesome you are in C/C++, you seem to be unable to actually accomplish relatively straightforward things.
I cannot imagine under what fantasy this seems reasonable to you. YAWS spanks every one of those webservers; its only real competition in production is LightStreamer. You've never actually benchmarked any of these, have you? Just speculating, aren't you?
And you believe this why?
Which is handwave for "I have no idea what I'm talking about but really wish I did." I assume you think that anything running inside the OS must somehow by definition be faster than something running as an application outside the OS, which is laughably naive regarding where the actual limits in server scaling are.
Until you have some idea how replacing a timeslicer would affect an application, you have no idea what you're talking about. No large scaling webserver uses the Linux (or for that matter the Windows) timeslicer; their design is aimed for a more general case usage. I'd be willing to bet you don't even know the growth rate of your scheduler. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn 1) that you have no idea what that phrase means, 2) that you think you do know what that phrase means, 3) that you can't understand why that's germane in a serving situation, and that 4) you're going to try to hold up this critical issue that you fail to understand as evidence of my failing to put together important pieces in the effort to cobble together an argument.
Which is hilariously common among people who run guess driven argument as if it were fact, as you're doing.
(I'm not even going to dignify your attempt to sound smart by dropping the wrong name for bandwidth caps as if it had anything to do with a discussion of webserver scaling. That's like mentioning gas tank size in engine fuel efficiency discussions: fundamentally retarded.)
You do not remember correctly. You should go look into PCI bandwidth to understand why people who actually do this stuff are currently laughing at you so hard.
If you respond - and I confess I'm not looking forward to such a thing - do us both the favor of not making any arguments based on "obvious reasons", what you may or may not remember correctly, "should"-driven guessing. It's kind of boring. Stick to what you know well enough that you can give numbers, actual growth rates, case examples, studies or actual benchmarks.
This speculation bullshit reeks of someone who's never even tried half the things they're discussing.
That you believe several books over the course of six years constitutes a resurgence, especially given the historic nature of the language, kind of goes a pretty long way towards proving my point about its nearly non-extant market share.
Don't get me wrong, I think LISP is a wonderful language. But, let's not do ourselves the disservice, please, of pretending that it's been a major player since the 1960s. If you look at the list of supposedly dead languages that majorly outpace LISP in real world usage measured either as new code or maintained code (eg Delphi, Clipper, Fortran, Cobol, PL/I, Ada, Forth, ANSI Pascal, Object Pascal, ColdFusion, pre-.NET ASP, all on both metrics) you get a clearer idea of where things actually stand.
If LISP is so amazing, and if LISP has first mover advantage over anything the average programmer has ever heard of, why is it so resoundingly a bit player?
There are downsides to LISP. Lots of them. Serious ones. It hasn't stayed this dead for 60 years because it's the tragic forgotten child of programming; every freshman who wants to sound educated thumps it at their first opportunity, frequently without ever having written a line (which is not to call you a freshman, just to point out how not-unknown it is.)
It's a little like SICP. If it's been that free, that well known and that easily accessable for 20 years, how come it's being discarded by the university that published it for curriculum, and how come its design principles are largely unseen even in the work of people who have read it?
There's a lot to be said for academic languages and academic exercises; they open our eyes to many new approaches to problems.
But don't kid yourself. They died for a reason. Why is it that all the supposedly awful languages and design strategies are dominant?
It's because they work. For all their warts, for all their maintenance problems, for all the infrastructure you have to write, they work.
New practical languages are occurring which adopt many of the lessons of LISP. Ruby got a lot of LISP's problems removed, though it's still got a lot of problems of its own; Haskell can say the same. Erlang's got most of those problems cleared up, and is a practical real world language for a lot of things.
But dude, if the most impressive thing you can find is the application of graph search to a complex web form with credit card processing that the typical college sophomore could throw together in about a month, I mean, I'm really not sure what to tell you. Orbitz is ridiculously slow for the amount of data it processes, its user interface is awful, it copes poorly with unexpected things like uncommon use of the browser back button, and I usually have to go to it first so that I can check everywhere else and then by the time I'm done everywhere else maybe Orbitz has finally finished its first search.
What Orbitz does that's impressive is their ability to negotiate ticket prices. I go there because they get the bottom dollar bid. If that's your idea of something you can hold up to show the success of LISP, I've got to ask you: why have you gotten down to rare occasional me-too projects as your shining beacon?
Yahoo! Stores was lisp too. (Note the past tense.)
Big whoop.
When it gets down to it, you should actually try writing something like that some time in LISP. Then try writing it in another language. It's not really all that different. It'll be maybe the dollar sign instead of the parentheses whose ink wears off on your keyboard, and the whatever other language you write will probably be somewhat bulkier (though if you're working in a language like Erlang, Haskell, Mozart-Oz or Forth, it'll be substantially shorter).
Meh. Ten extra letters to get a three line algorithm done. Trade that for real exceptions and a strong type system, and you've chosen C++. Trade that for the pi calculus (which is hella more expressive than the lambda, and typically completely foreign to the LISPers who preach syntax superiori