> In fact, with a good macro library, I can write code just as fast and well in assembly as in any other language.
I really don't agree. We use high-level languages because they are easier to understand, they are more scalable and they generally enable code to be written quickly compared to low-level languages. Language choices do matter.
If it were true that language doesn't matter, wouldn't we all still be using assembly language?
I second the observation regarding Windows drivers.
I still can't get Windows 7 to work with my LAN cards and both of my soundcards - and yes, I have tried disabling one of them. I've tried downloading drivers, no joy. Ubuntu just works. I also had similar experiences with XP (although at least the LAN card worked then). Linux is the way to go for good hardware support.
Flash is not just video. Flash is required for plenty of useful websites - one example is hotel sites. I'm arriving overseas, I go to check the location or contact number of my hotel - but the site is in flash. Similar situations have occurred several times when using my iPhone. Another common examples is band websites.
As others have noted, the choice of at least using the latest Flash can only be a good thing and it's a win for Android over the iPhone, no argument.
Apple clearly have a strategy against Adobe, but it may well be that Flash is more important to consumers than they would like. Even my non-geek friends and relatives are astounded when they find that an iPhone can't use a lot of websites. Still, from a third party point of view, either Apple loses, which is a win for openness, or Apple win, which means no more Flash. Either way, it's a step forward.
Looking forward to getting an Android phone when my contract expires.
I completely agree that without interaction, lectures may as well be videos.
However, there are ways to make large lectures interactive. For example, dividing students into groups and them interacting with each other. Or allowing students to vote on certain issues. The opportunity to ask questions is something you don't get with videos. The list is surprisingly long, but it requires research and careful planning to do well.
>there isn't a major economic power in the world, that isn't guilty as hell for selling equipment causing suppression, misery, and death..
Citations needed. Japan? What do you count as major? I'm just trying to avoid the Slashdot habit of being overly cynical. Governments do good things, and people do altruistic things.
> I thought trademarks were related to the possibility of accidental confusion. If Murdoch thinks the average person will confuse BSkyB and Skype, he must have the most horrendous opinion of the average person!
- has been going for a very long time, and often involves more sophisticated physical robots.
Also, as many people have pointed out, this is not really all that original. One of the oldest Genetic Programming's PhDs (in 1980) evolved card players. Tierra pre-dates this stuff. Nothing surprising has emerged here, but I guess it is a nice popular science article for those not familiar with the field.
As others have pointed out, Roger Alsing's Mona Lisa is very cool, as is the work that went into evolving an aerial design for NASA:
http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm... there are over 6000 papers published on Genetic Programming and a huge chunk of them are applications like this. EC techniques like this are just heuristic search algorithms for program spaces.
> iOS is not the biggerst mobile operating system in any way shape or form. RIM has far more devices in North America and Nokia rules the rest of the world.
Mobile phone or mobile device?
Linux by far dominates the world market in embedded systems. But who cares? O/S's are not football teams.
Having spent a few years working with IBM mainframes running 30-year-old COBOL and assembly code, the problems of maintainability are always sitting at the back of my mind when debates like this come up.
I've worked in Java and C commercially, and recently I've done a few web projects in PHP and JavaScript. I'm currently an academic researcher, and in that job I've spent some time writing Python and C++. I'm also familiar with the way we're teaching languages and programming, having been involved in the labs and lectures.
I think we are in danger of creating a "new wave" (apologies to French cinema) of legacy software. Whilst scripting, dynamically-typed, languages can be fun and faster as tools to build code in the first place, they do not constrain or discipline the programmer as much as something like Java. Object-orientation with static typing etc. took off because it is a great way to design (some, not all) software in a structured manner to improve communication between engineers and address concerns like maintainability.
I understand why people are using things like Ruby and Python right now, but I suspect it might be a short-termist view of the world. If you're planning to throw your website away, perhaps that's ok. Invariable though, things last much, much, longer than you expect them to.
We've already seen how poorly sites like Facebook scale - imagine what they will be like in another 10 years. We may well look back on these years of great web development as building a legacy that a lot of us spend the rest of our lives trying to reverse-engineer, fix and replace.
Mozilla is a foundation, not a company. That is, if we exclude the corporation subsidiary that deals with sponsorship etc.
So, this is not some capitalist ideal of two companies competing for our benefit, rather a very non-capitalist foundation that is encouraging what capitalism discourages. If Mozilla didn't exist, Google might not have bothered to up their reward.
You're right - the iPhone would get more press and more criticism for this.
This is because Apple are so good at marketing and manipulating the press. Great when it helps the company sell products, but not so great when things are going wrong.
There is plenty of "real news" going on when Apple launch their newest product line, but they still get an amount of press out of proportion to the importance of their products.
I'm a research associate (post-doc, I finished my PhD last year) in Computer Science. I work in an area that involves comparisons between the performance of algorithms, although I have no specific knowledge about the area you've been working in.
A few people have given good advice already, but I'll add my thoughts:
- Submit to a conference, not a journal. In Computer Science, conferences are usually regarded as more important than journals (this is very unusual for a scientific field). There are so many conferences, you should be able to publish somewhere provided the work is decent. You can then get very useful feedback by attending the conference, and potentially move on to a journal paper.
- Write your paper in LaTeX. It's really not difficult to learn and is usually pretty much text with the occasional formatting instruction. The exception is mathematical formulae, for which LaTeX is great but it takes a while to get used to.
- Couch your work in the field. You need to reference previous papers, ensure you are not duplicating someone else's work, and show how your ideas link to those of others.
- If you attend independently you will have to pay for the conference. So that's flights, hotel, living costs and conference registration (quick example of the latter is 400UKP).
- Don't worry about publications like Science!
- If you're comparing your algorithm to another implementation, you must be rigorous. You're writing a "horse race" paper where you're showing one is faster/better than another. To do so in a fair, principled and generalisable way is difficult. An absolute basic must is that you use statistics properly: your results must be statistically significant, but also have an effect size that must be interesting. You'll have to run the algorithms on some example problems - are these problems representative? Will the results generalise to other problems? Your algorithm may also require parameters to be chosen. How do you decide these parameters? What about the algorithm you're comparing to? Are you putting the same effort into tuning the performance of both?
As others have said, by far the best way to achieve all of these things is to get in touch with an academic. They'll help with the writing, experimental method, and ensure that your work fits into the field.
I'd be happy to take a look at anything you write and give you advice on writing style and what you need to do to make it publishable.
"I fondly remember the days when products lived and died on their fitness for purpose, not in the courts. So much for free market economics. What shall we call this? SHAckled Market Economics"
You do? When was that? Some time prior to capitalism?
Ah, fair point on the PNG relevance to Ubuntu's overall plan - I just meant as a photographer I didn't care much about it. Hopefully Shotwell will be better at editing by then... maybe?
Yesterday I started using Shotwell after spending months using a combination of f-spot and Picasa.
F-Spot is the worst photo manager I've ever used. There are two main issues: it doesn't scale, and it's unstable. It doesn't scale in that I have about 15 000 photos (I'm into photography) and scrolling is terrible, importing hundreds of photos at a time is slow and unreliable. When I restored from a backup and asked F-Spot to import the images from a folder, I just gave up after 5 attempts.
F-Spot crashes frequently. This is mainly when importing and exporting images. It's full of bugs, and this makes it unusable.
Picasa under wine scales perfectly well. I just don't like its approach (grabbing all images from your disk and using tags to organise them), plus its non-native interface looks ugly.
Shotwell is relatively simple. It works, it has a cleaner approach than F-Spot to organisation, and it doesn't crash. It lacks features and its "enhance" button is useless, but I'm sure it will improve over time. By far the best Linux photo manager I've tried.
Regarding some other comments: supporting PNG is failing irrelevant for me. Advanced editing is a job for the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
To balance up the "NZ is a bit behind the times" discussion... the first internet cafe I saw running Linux on their machines was in Arthur's Pass, NZ, in 2005.
> Anyone who is thinking as they read instead of blindly ploughing through the words would have realized that Earth has not reached it's final century yet?
I too installed the script in Ubuntu no problem through Synaptic.
Anyhows, just tried it out on a photo and the parent is absolutely right - wtf!? Witchcraft indeed! This easily matches what I've seen on the Adobe videos. I just removed a whole person from a photo! Crazy.
It's a daft and provocative statement. If running the internet is what matters, then Linux or Apache would be more obvious candidates. Still, daft thing to state.
A gun is a weapon. It's used to kill things. It is very dangerous, and people can lose their lives through accidental and malicious use of them.
Don't buy a gun. Don't keep a gun in your house. Don't carry a gun.
The danger of gun ownership far outweigh the benefit of recreational use.
A handgun is not going to prevent your government from abusing its power. Governments have much bigger weapons than you can buy.
A handgun is not going to prevent someone breaking into your home. Maybe you'll shoot the guy. Maybe he'll shoot you. Either way, you just cost someone their life.
I know the parents were negligent in this case, but people who own handguns are making the world a more dangerous place for everyone.
You're right, Apple is concerned about Flash being used to replace purchased Apps, which is surely the reason they are refusing to support it. They could lose money from App sales.
Worth noting in addition that they would also lose control over deployed software, as Flash could act as an alternative platform to target that does not belong to Apple. So, Flash applications could duplicate Apple's software, but more importantly offer music streaming and video services, e-book readers etc. That could give consumers choice that would potentially lead to much larger losses for Apple.
I guess Apple won't admit the motivation for avoiding Flash, they're probably concerned they could fall foul of anti-competitive legislation.
On the positive side, less Flash on the web in general is probably a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
> In fact, with a good macro library, I can write code just as fast and well in assembly as in any other language.
I really don't agree. We use high-level languages because they are easier to understand, they are more scalable and they generally enable code to be written quickly compared to low-level languages. Language choices do matter.
If it were true that language doesn't matter, wouldn't we all still be using assembly language?
RS.
http://goo.gl/cr4p+
The power of slashdot.
RS
I second the observation regarding Windows drivers.
I still can't get Windows 7 to work with my LAN cards and both of my soundcards - and yes, I have tried disabling one of them. I've tried downloading drivers, no joy. Ubuntu just works. I also had similar experiences with XP (although at least the LAN card worked then). Linux is the way to go for good hardware support.
RS.
Flash is not just video. Flash is required for plenty of useful websites - one example is hotel sites. I'm arriving overseas, I go to check the location or contact number of my hotel - but the site is in flash. Similar situations have occurred several times when using my iPhone. Another common examples is band websites.
As others have noted, the choice of at least using the latest Flash can only be a good thing and it's a win for Android over the iPhone, no argument.
Apple clearly have a strategy against Adobe, but it may well be that Flash is more important to consumers than they would like. Even my non-geek friends and relatives are astounded when they find that an iPhone can't use a lot of websites. Still, from a third party point of view, either Apple loses, which is a win for openness, or Apple win, which means no more Flash. Either way, it's a step forward.
Looking forward to getting an Android phone when my contract expires.
RS.
I completely agree that without interaction, lectures may as well be videos.
However, there are ways to make large lectures interactive. For example, dividing students into groups and them interacting with each other. Or allowing students to vote on certain issues. The opportunity to ask questions is something you don't get with videos. The list is surprisingly long, but it requires research and careful planning to do well.
RS
> 858 fires and explosions on offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico from 2001 to 2010.
858? Seriously people, quit smoking on the rig.
>there isn't a major economic power in the world, that isn't guilty as hell for selling equipment causing suppression, misery, and death..
Citations needed. Japan? What do you count as major? I'm just trying to avoid the Slashdot habit of being overly cynical. Governments do good things, and people do altruistic things.
> I thought trademarks were related to the possibility of accidental confusion. If Murdoch thinks the average person will confuse BSkyB and Skype, he must have the most horrendous opinion of the average person!
You have clearly never watched his TV output.
http://www.robocup.org/
- has been going for a very long time, and often involves more sophisticated physical robots.
Also, as many people have pointed out, this is not really all that original. One of the oldest Genetic Programming's PhDs (in 1980) evolved card players. Tierra pre-dates this stuff. Nothing surprising has emerged here, but I guess it is a nice popular science article for those not familiar with the field.
As others have pointed out, Roger Alsing's Mona Lisa is very cool, as is the work that went into evolving an aerial design for NASA:
http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm ... there are over 6000 papers published on Genetic Programming and a huge chunk of them are applications like this. EC techniques like this are just heuristic search algorithms for program spaces.
RS.
> iOS is not the biggerst mobile operating system in any way shape or form. RIM has far more devices in North America and Nokia rules the rest of the world.
Mobile phone or mobile device?
Linux by far dominates the world market in embedded systems. But who cares? O/S's are not football teams.
RS.
Having spent a few years working with IBM mainframes running 30-year-old COBOL and assembly code, the problems of maintainability are always sitting at the back of my mind when debates like this come up.
I've worked in Java and C commercially, and recently I've done a few web projects in PHP and JavaScript. I'm currently an academic researcher, and in that job I've spent some time writing Python and C++. I'm also familiar with the way we're teaching languages and programming, having been involved in the labs and lectures.
I think we are in danger of creating a "new wave" (apologies to French cinema) of legacy software. Whilst scripting, dynamically-typed, languages can be fun and faster as tools to build code in the first place, they do not constrain or discipline the programmer as much as something like Java. Object-orientation with static typing etc. took off because it is a great way to design (some, not all) software in a structured manner to improve communication between engineers and address concerns like maintainability.
I understand why people are using things like Ruby and Python right now, but I suspect it might be a short-termist view of the world. If you're planning to throw your website away, perhaps that's ok. Invariable though, things last much, much, longer than you expect them to.
We've already seen how poorly sites like Facebook scale - imagine what they will be like in another 10 years. We may well look back on these years of great web development as building a legacy that a lot of us spend the rest of our lives trying to reverse-engineer, fix and replace.
RS
Mozilla is a foundation, not a company. That is, if we exclude the corporation subsidiary that deals with sponsorship etc.
So, this is not some capitalist ideal of two companies competing for our benefit, rather a very non-capitalist foundation that is encouraging what capitalism discourages. If Mozilla didn't exist, Google might not have bothered to up their reward.
RS
You're right - the iPhone would get more press and more criticism for this.
This is because Apple are so good at marketing and manipulating the press. Great when it helps the company sell products, but not so great when things are going wrong.
There is plenty of "real news" going on when Apple launch their newest product line, but they still get an amount of press out of proportion to the importance of their products.
RS
...buy a different handset? Something about freedom.
RS.
Hi,
I'm a research associate (post-doc, I finished my PhD last year) in Computer Science. I work in an area that involves comparisons between the performance of algorithms, although I have no specific knowledge about the area you've been working in.
A few people have given good advice already, but I'll add my thoughts:
- Submit to a conference, not a journal. In Computer Science, conferences are usually regarded as more important than journals (this is very unusual for a scientific field). There are so many conferences, you should be able to publish somewhere provided the work is decent. You can then get very useful feedback by attending the conference, and potentially move on to a journal paper.
- Write your paper in LaTeX. It's really not difficult to learn and is usually pretty much text with the occasional formatting instruction. The exception is mathematical formulae, for which LaTeX is great but it takes a while to get used to.
- Couch your work in the field. You need to reference previous papers, ensure you are not duplicating someone else's work, and show how your ideas link to those of others.
- If you attend independently you will have to pay for the conference. So that's flights, hotel, living costs and conference registration (quick example of the latter is 400UKP).
- Don't worry about publications like Science!
- If you're comparing your algorithm to another implementation, you must be rigorous. You're writing a "horse race" paper where you're showing one is faster/better than another. To do so in a fair, principled and generalisable way is difficult. An absolute basic must is that you use statistics properly: your results must be statistically significant, but also have an effect size that must be interesting. You'll have to run the algorithms on some example problems - are these problems representative? Will the results generalise to other problems? Your algorithm may also require parameters to be chosen. How do you decide these parameters? What about the algorithm you're comparing to? Are you putting the same effort into tuning the performance of both?
As others have said, by far the best way to achieve all of these things is to get in touch with an academic. They'll help with the writing, experimental method, and ensure that your work fits into the field.
I'd be happy to take a look at anything you write and give you advice on writing style and what you need to do to make it publishable.
Hope that helps,
RS.
"I fondly remember the days when products lived and died on their fitness for purpose, not in the courts. So much for free market economics. What shall we call this? SHAckled Market Economics"
You do? When was that? Some time prior to capitalism?
Ah, fair point on the PNG relevance to Ubuntu's overall plan - I just meant as a photographer I didn't care much about it. Hopefully Shotwell will be better at editing by then... maybe?
Yesterday I started using Shotwell after spending months using a combination of f-spot and Picasa.
F-Spot is the worst photo manager I've ever used. There are two main issues: it doesn't scale, and it's unstable. It doesn't scale in that I have about 15 000 photos (I'm into photography) and scrolling is terrible, importing hundreds of photos at a time is slow and unreliable. When I restored from a backup and asked F-Spot to import the images from a folder, I just gave up after 5 attempts.
F-Spot crashes frequently. This is mainly when importing and exporting images. It's full of bugs, and this makes it unusable.
Picasa under wine scales perfectly well. I just don't like its approach (grabbing all images from your disk and using tags to organise them), plus its non-native interface looks ugly.
Shotwell is relatively simple. It works, it has a cleaner approach than F-Spot to organisation, and it doesn't crash. It lacks features and its "enhance" button is useless, but I'm sure it will improve over time. By far the best Linux photo manager I've tried.
Regarding some other comments: supporting PNG is failing irrelevant for me. Advanced editing is a job for the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
To balance up the "NZ is a bit behind the times" discussion... the first internet cafe I saw running Linux on their machines was in Arthur's Pass, NZ, in 2005.
Anecdotal, I know, but interesting.
> Anyone who is thinking as they read instead of blindly ploughing through the words would have realized that Earth has not reached it's final century yet?
That's the spirit! Sure we haven't!
I too installed the script in Ubuntu no problem through Synaptic.
Anyhows, just tried it out on a photo and the parent is absolutely right - wtf!? Witchcraft indeed! This easily matches what I've seen on the Adobe videos. I just removed a whole person from a photo! Crazy.
RS
Agreed on the "most important" hyperbole.
It's a daft and provocative statement. If running the internet is what matters, then Linux or Apache would be more obvious candidates. Still, daft thing to state.
RS
Seriously people.
A gun is a weapon. It's used to kill things. It is very dangerous, and people can lose their lives through accidental and malicious use of them.
Don't buy a gun. Don't keep a gun in your house. Don't carry a gun.
The danger of gun ownership far outweigh the benefit of recreational use.
A handgun is not going to prevent your government from abusing its power. Governments have much bigger weapons than you can buy.
A handgun is not going to prevent someone breaking into your home. Maybe you'll shoot the guy. Maybe he'll shoot you. Either way, you just cost someone their life.
I know the parents were negligent in this case, but people who own handguns are making the world a more dangerous place for everyone.
What is wrong with you?
RS
You're right, Apple is concerned about Flash being used to replace purchased Apps, which is surely the reason they are refusing to support it. They could lose money from App sales.
Worth noting in addition that they would also lose control over deployed software, as Flash could act as an alternative platform to target that does not belong to Apple. So, Flash applications could duplicate Apple's software, but more importantly offer music streaming and video services, e-book readers etc. That could give consumers choice that would potentially lead to much larger losses for Apple.
I guess Apple won't admit the motivation for avoiding Flash, they're probably concerned they could fall foul of anti-competitive legislation.
On the positive side, less Flash on the web in general is probably a good thing.
RS
I don't know if you've used iTunes, but I have.
It is such a horrible piece of software that I'd say *not* running iTunes is one of Linux's great strengths :-D.
RS