Old programming languages still work fine for new tech if they have appropriate libraries, etc
I have a perfect example on how wrong you are: Fortran.
I do a lot of engineering software and a lot of that is in Fortran. A few years ago I migrated a system with 400 thousand lines of VAX-Fortran code to Linux, using g77. Recently I had to install this system in a new computer, running Ubuntu Lucid. To my dismay, I learned that Lucid doesn't have the g77 package anymore, the gcc compiler suite has been "upgraded" to gfortran. And gfortran does not support the VAX extensions that g77 did.
Luckily there's still a way to install g77 in Lucid using the Hardy repositories, but how long will this last?
Had the old engineers said, "OK, Fortran is dead, let's just keep a legacy compiler to run old code" everything would have been fine. But no, they insist on "improving" Fortran by putting C language features, e.g. pointers, into it. Why can't they just learn to program in C and let the old compilers do what they are good for, which is running legacy code?
I once signed a petition to retire Fortran, where the best reason why experience isn't always welcome is stated: "In order to best serve future generations of scientists who rely on numerical simulation, we propose that FORTRAN be retired, allowing its successor(s) to evolve in the absence of the legacy FORTRAN juggernaut. Until FORTRAN is formally retired by the J3 Committee, institutional inertia will prevent alternatives from being adopted by science and industry"
The current Fortran standard is the worst of all possibilities: unable to run legacy code which is stable and tested, and unable to compete with modern languages in either execution speed or programming ease.
(And before anyone comes with some contrived benchmarks "proving" that Fortran code executes faster than C, let me point out that the legacy Lapack code is optimized in Atlas by compiling key functions in C+Assembly code)
People believing that there is only 1 inventor of an idea don't know shit about history.
I couldn't agree more with this! Not only there are patents that are submitted by totally different people almost simultaneously - the telephone patent where Alexander Graham Bell submitted his entry a few hours before Elisha Grey is a good example - but also most inventions are a gradual evolution of separate ideas that end converging into something useful.
Look up the Selden patent to see how a hundred years ago some car manufacturers tried to spread FUD about how people who bought cars from other manufacturers could be sued and lose their automobiles because the other manufacturers hadn't paid royalties to the "automobile inventor". Sound familiar?
what this survey really says is that most Americans at least know their current president and remember the last one.
No, it says that 22% of Americans know their current president, 5% think the last one is still in the White House, and 4% think the next to the last president is still there.
However, if you do consider the sep-10 outlier, the red curve looks more like an exponential function than a line. OMG, song incomes have already been surpassed by app sales!
Very interesting graph, thanks. Do you happen to have a link to the raw data for this?
One important point there, until the 1990s sales were growing year by year, then they suddenly dropped. Total sales from new formats is nowhere close to what CDs brought in their peak.
It seems like the RIAA is right in that downloads are hurting their income badly. I like that. I cannot see an ethical justification for all those billions going into the music industry like that, without any benefit to the public or to the artists.
Trains are early 19th century technology, cars are late-19th/early-20th century.
I think this proposal is great, it's not about "bolting" something on a car, it's about creating an entirely new technology, a dynamic, self-assembling train. It merges some of the efficiency in a train to some of the flexibility in a car.
Besides, it's probably the lowest cost and faster implementation technology available for a new transportation system. I don't see any radical improvements in track technology coming soon, we have seen decades of research in magnetic levitation tracks without any feasible candidate, without mentioning the huge cost of laying any new system of tracks.
And I don't see any radical improvement in vehicle technology coming soon either, also without mentioning the huge cost in implementing new vehicles. Think of the investment that would be needed to convert to electric cars, for instance. New charging stations, battery manufacturing, power plants and transmission lines, etc.
Just because the naming convention uses the phrase "LikeWord95" doesn't mean you need the Word 95 source doe to implement it:
From your link:
'Declaration
Public Class AutoSpaceLikeWord95 _
Inherits OnOffType
'Usage
Dim instance As AutoSpaceLikeWord95
No, I don't see how to implement AutoSpaceLikeWord95 there. That's just the documentation on how to *USE* a pre-compiled version of AutoSpaceLikeWord95. That's *NOT* an implementation of it.
I repeat, ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE THE WORD95 SOURCE CODE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO IMPLEMENT "AutoSpaceLikeWord95".
Besides, that link presents an interesting bit of evidence:
(Incorrectly Adjust Text Spacing for Specific Unicode Ranges)
Get it? The ISO standard intentionally specifies an *INCORRECT* spacing for unicode ranges, because Word95 was incorrect and it would be too much bother for them to fix it...
It might surprise some people to learn this, but humans have better hearing than dogs.
Have you ever trained a dog to do one task when you whistle a C# tone and another when you whistle a Db tone? The difference between C-sharp and D-flat is 80/81 but humans can discern it. Even those humans who are "tone deaf" can tell if one tone is higher than the other, but I have never seen a dog that could do any accurate recognition of sound frequencies.
As for very faint sounds, the human ear is as accurate as it can be. I majored at electronics engineering at college and I once had a class where we measured the ultimate low-level sound sensitivity of our own ears in an anechoic chamber. After the professor did the math, we realized that the sensitivity of the human ear is just above the level where one could hear every single air molecule hitting the eardrum.
Humans have wonderful hearing, make no mistake about that.
The fact that you don't like OOXML (and you would be hard pressed to find anyone that does - especially anyone who's had to write for it) doesn't make it not open.
Except that the OOXML ISO "standard" contains stuff like "autoSpaceLikeWord95" which means you need the Word 95 source code to implement it.
The ODF standard may be hard to understand, but if you work hard enough you can implement it. The OOXML, otoh, can be implemented by ONE AND ONLY ONE entity on earth: M$.
dark matter may interact with its own kind by forces other than the ones that cause normal matter to interact with its own kind. According to the musing (which the author rejects), dark matter operating under such forces could form complex systems, maybe even an unseen parallel universe where "people" live lives like ours, as unaware of us as we are of them. All undetectable, except by their gravitational attraction on us.
A plot for an SF story: every time the universe branches due to wavefunction collapse a copy of the universe is created which still interacts with the universe through gravitation but not through the other forces.
Local effects of this are extremely difficult to measure, but they can be perceived as a fifth force that appears, for instance in the Pioneer anomaly.
I wish my writing skills were good enough to write this story...
Jurassic Park was the only book I threw in the trash can immediately after reading. It was nothing but a long, boring, anti-science rant.
Michael Crichton somehow got a notion of the mathematical theory of chaos in non-linear systems and assumed chaos is everything, therefore science can never get reliable results.
That's the fossilized DNA of Frankenstein that Crichton injected in a 20th century disaster film cell. The combination of two pieces of shit will never smell like roses.
last I saw, Ford Motor Company wasn't liable for drunk drivers that use their vehicles to drink and drive, resulting in death or destruction of property
Four orders of magnitude difference. Comparing lake Huron to the whole earth is like comparing my home town to lake Huron. It has been quite hot in my town lately, there has been a lot of rain and the local ponds are much higher in level than I've ever recorded.
All the while I've been thinking "it has been like that ever since the guy who owns that gas station bought his SUV".
Do you accept that kind of logic? If so, then it's demonstrated that SUVs cause global warming. And that's *your* kind of logic: extrapolate local anecdotes to infer global phenomena.
You constantly see people that claim they're libertarians while preaching that the free market will fix 'everything'
And vice-versa, you often see people preaching that regulation will fix 'everything'.
Wanna get instant karma on Slashdot? Pick a discussion on energy and say that "deregulation caused the California energy crisis": (+5, Insightful) ia a few minutes. Try to do some basic research on the matter and you will find that the energy crisis was caused by companies like Enron manipulating the regulations.
Regulations are like medicine, they can cure a problem, but the wrong medicine will kill you. The mantra of regulation should be "above all do no harm", it's better to have no regulation at all than some regulation that kills you. But this does not mean that you can live entirely without regulations.
'Free market' vs 'Regulation' fanatics are like naturist hippies vs hypochondriacs, neither are right. You cannot expect that clean natural living will cure all your illnesses, but you cannot go and take every medicine available either.
Plenty of karma, don't worry. However no mod points, have been posting too actively of late. If I had I would give the GP (-1, offtopic).
Why is it that leftists always mock of libertarianism with this monotonous "free market" chant? Economic freedom is *one* of the infinite liberties a person can have. The free market works admirably for what it's meant to do, but it's not a tool for everything.
The free market is *not* intended to maximize the preservation of human life. We do need some regulations for that. Of course, there are private corporations, like this one to verify that regulations are being followed, but they do not make the regulations, that's not what the "free market" is intended to do.
So, in the end, there must exist some form of governmental or non-market regulations in effect. No libertarian denies that.
You fool! You're suposed to let the free market decide! If too many people die at hospital A, just go to hospital B!
That should be true for non-life-threatening circumstances.
The satire that leftists make of libertarianism is rather stupid and preaching to the choir.
Libertarianism isn't about getting rid of all regulations and having no government at all, that would be classical communism, the ultimate goal of Marxism.
Libertarianism is about being aware that one person's liberty ends where the other person's liberty begins. It's about making those limits more or less equal to everybody. The hospital's liberty to cut corners ends where my liberty to live begins.
The free market isn't the goal of libertarians, it's just one of the consequences. And it works for its purposes which are economic in nature.
Now go back to reading Trotsky, Bakunin, and Marx, I think you missed a few chapters.
The answer might surprise you, as it is paradoxal : get rid of infant mortality. This has been proven in every developing country : the FIRST step to reducing population is to completely eliminate infant mortality
It is a fact that lower infant mortality is correlated with lower number of children per family. But the real question is which causes the other? Which came first?
I can see a clear rationale for arguing that smaller families cause lower infant mortality rates. Parents can take better care of their children if there aren't too many mouths to feed.
OTOH, I cannot see people having children as redundancy against premature death. That would imply in a long term family planning and those people have no instruction on family planning. If they had, they wouldn't have that many children.
I know a lot of people in developing countries consume insects as a staple form of food, the squirm factor for western audiences would be quite high however.
Western audiences do consume stuff that's pretty close to insects.
I guess the right way to market it would be to call it "something shrimp". Few people would to the research to find out exactly what that means.
Also, and most important to me, if I have a situation where people wants regular updates(my kid deathly sick in the hospital), it is an easy way to send them without annoying people.
I can also follow friends and family with annoying them.
Two words: identity theft.
"Here's my last picture of grandpa Jones" means your mother's maiden name was Jones.
"Here's the family in front of our new home" means the street number appears on the photo.
And so on. I don't want to spread unnecessary data about myself and my family, that's why I don't use social networks.
I'm pretty sure debt isn't transferrable like that...
Huh? WTF?
Tell me, have you heard of any recent abduction stories in the US?
No, I don't think so. That's because the aliens who invaded the US had to cut their science budget to pay their debt. No more human anatomy studies for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least "bisex" and "board" are all adjacent letters in a qwerty keyboard, so you cannot deny that it's possible.
Old programming languages still work fine for new tech if they have appropriate libraries, etc
I have a perfect example on how wrong you are: Fortran.
I do a lot of engineering software and a lot of that is in Fortran. A few years ago I migrated a system with 400 thousand lines of VAX-Fortran code to Linux, using g77. Recently I had to install this system in a new computer, running Ubuntu Lucid. To my dismay, I learned that Lucid doesn't have the g77 package anymore, the gcc compiler suite has been "upgraded" to gfortran. And gfortran does not support the VAX extensions that g77 did.
Luckily there's still a way to install g77 in Lucid using the Hardy repositories, but how long will this last?
Had the old engineers said, "OK, Fortran is dead, let's just keep a legacy compiler to run old code" everything would have been fine. But no, they insist on "improving" Fortran by putting C language features, e.g. pointers, into it. Why can't they just learn to program in C and let the old compilers do what they are good for, which is running legacy code?
I once signed a petition to retire Fortran, where the best reason why experience isn't always welcome is stated: "In order to best serve future generations of scientists who rely on numerical simulation, we propose that FORTRAN be retired, allowing its successor(s) to evolve in the absence of the legacy FORTRAN juggernaut. Until FORTRAN is formally retired by the J3 Committee, institutional inertia will prevent alternatives from being adopted by science and industry"
The current Fortran standard is the worst of all possibilities: unable to run legacy code which is stable and tested, and unable to compete with modern languages in either execution speed or programming ease.
(And before anyone comes with some contrived benchmarks "proving" that Fortran code executes faster than C, let me point out that the legacy Lapack code is optimized in Atlas by compiling key functions in C+Assembly code)
People believing that there is only 1 inventor of an idea don't know shit about history.
I couldn't agree more with this! Not only there are patents that are submitted by totally different people almost simultaneously - the telephone patent where Alexander Graham Bell submitted his entry a few hours before Elisha Grey is a good example - but also most inventions are a gradual evolution of separate ideas that end converging into something useful.
Look up the Selden patent to see how a hundred years ago some car manufacturers tried to spread FUD about how people who bought cars from other manufacturers could be sued and lose their automobiles because the other manufacturers hadn't paid royalties to the "automobile inventor". Sound familiar?
what this survey really says is that most Americans at least know their current president and remember the last one.
No, it says that 22% of Americans know their current president, 5% think the last one is still in the White House, and 4% think the next to the last president is still there.
However, if you do consider the sep-10 outlier, the red curve looks more like an exponential function than a line. OMG, song incomes have already been surpassed by app sales!
Very interesting graph, thanks. Do you happen to have a link to the raw data for this?
One important point there, until the 1990s sales were growing year by year, then they suddenly dropped. Total sales from new formats is nowhere close to what CDs brought in their peak.
It seems like the RIAA is right in that downloads are hurting their income badly. I like that. I cannot see an ethical justification for all those billions going into the music industry like that, without any benefit to the public or to the artists.
Trains are early 19th century technology, cars are late-19th/early-20th century.
I think this proposal is great, it's not about "bolting" something on a car, it's about creating an entirely new technology, a dynamic, self-assembling train. It merges some of the efficiency in a train to some of the flexibility in a car.
Besides, it's probably the lowest cost and faster implementation technology available for a new transportation system. I don't see any radical improvements in track technology coming soon, we have seen decades of research in magnetic levitation tracks without any feasible candidate, without mentioning the huge cost of laying any new system of tracks.
And I don't see any radical improvement in vehicle technology coming soon either, also without mentioning the huge cost in implementing new vehicles. Think of the investment that would be needed to convert to electric cars, for instance. New charging stations, battery manufacturing, power plants and transmission lines, etc.
Just because the naming convention uses the phrase "LikeWord95" doesn't mean you need the Word 95 source doe to implement it:
From your link:
'Declaration
Public Class AutoSpaceLikeWord95 _
Inherits OnOffType
'Usage
Dim instance As AutoSpaceLikeWord95
No, I don't see how to implement AutoSpaceLikeWord95 there. That's just the documentation on how to *USE* a pre-compiled version of AutoSpaceLikeWord95. That's *NOT* an implementation of it.
I repeat, ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE THE WORD95 SOURCE CODE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO IMPLEMENT "AutoSpaceLikeWord95".
Besides, that link presents an interesting bit of evidence:
(Incorrectly Adjust Text Spacing for Specific Unicode Ranges)
Get it? The ISO standard intentionally specifies an *INCORRECT* spacing for unicode ranges, because Word95 was incorrect and it would be too much bother for them to fix it...
If I had keen hearing I could do it too.
It might surprise some people to learn this, but humans have better hearing than dogs.
Have you ever trained a dog to do one task when you whistle a C# tone and another when you whistle a Db tone? The difference between C-sharp and D-flat is 80/81 but humans can discern it. Even those humans who are "tone deaf" can tell if one tone is higher than the other, but I have never seen a dog that could do any accurate recognition of sound frequencies.
As for very faint sounds, the human ear is as accurate as it can be. I majored at electronics engineering at college and I once had a class where we measured the ultimate low-level sound sensitivity of our own ears in an anechoic chamber. After the professor did the math, we realized that the sensitivity of the human ear is just above the level where one could hear every single air molecule hitting the eardrum.
Humans have wonderful hearing, make no mistake about that.
The fact that you don't like OOXML (and you would be hard pressed to find anyone that does - especially anyone who's had to write for it) doesn't make it not open.
Except that the OOXML ISO "standard" contains stuff like "autoSpaceLikeWord95" which means you need the Word 95 source code to implement it.
The ODF standard may be hard to understand, but if you work hard enough you can implement it. The OOXML, otoh, can be implemented by ONE AND ONLY ONE entity on earth: M$.
dark matter may interact with its own kind by forces other than the ones that cause normal matter to interact with its own kind. According to the musing (which the author rejects), dark matter operating under such forces could form complex systems, maybe even an unseen parallel universe where "people" live lives like ours, as unaware of us as we are of them. All undetectable, except by their gravitational attraction on us.
A plot for an SF story: every time the universe branches due to wavefunction collapse a copy of the universe is created which still interacts with the universe through gravitation but not through the other forces.
Local effects of this are extremely difficult to measure, but they can be perceived as a fifth force that appears, for instance in the Pioneer anomaly.
I wish my writing skills were good enough to write this story...
Jurassic Park was the only book I threw in the trash can immediately after reading. It was nothing but a long, boring, anti-science rant.
Michael Crichton somehow got a notion of the mathematical theory of chaos in non-linear systems and assumed chaos is everything, therefore science can never get reliable results.
That's the fossilized DNA of Frankenstein that Crichton injected in a 20th century disaster film cell. The combination of two pieces of shit will never smell like roses.
last I saw, Ford Motor Company wasn't liable for drunk drivers that use their vehicles to drink and drive, resulting in death or destruction of property
But Ford did get sued, successfully, when the damage was caused by cost cutting and bad engineering.
I was looking at property on lake Huron,
Yeah, right.
Lake Huron surface area is 59596 km2
The earth's surface area is 510000000 km2
Four orders of magnitude difference. Comparing lake Huron to the whole earth is like comparing my home town to lake Huron. It has been quite hot in my town lately, there has been a lot of rain and the local ponds are much higher in level than I've ever recorded.
All the while I've been thinking "it has been like that ever since the guy who owns that gas station bought his SUV".
Do you accept that kind of logic? If so, then it's demonstrated that SUVs cause global warming. And that's *your* kind of logic: extrapolate local anecdotes to infer global phenomena.
My method: read the article. If the subject is important enough, look up the references. If it's not that important, who cares?
Governing systems without implicit trust of the vast majority of its employees are disasters waiting to happen.
The question is how vast? If they have the trust of (all - 1) of their employees leaks will happen.
You constantly see people that claim they're libertarians while preaching that the free market will fix 'everything'
And vice-versa, you often see people preaching that regulation will fix 'everything'.
Wanna get instant karma on Slashdot? Pick a discussion on energy and say that "deregulation caused the California energy crisis": (+5, Insightful) ia a few minutes. Try to do some basic research on the matter and you will find that the energy crisis was caused by companies like Enron manipulating the regulations.
Regulations are like medicine, they can cure a problem, but the wrong medicine will kill you. The mantra of regulation should be "above all do no harm", it's better to have no regulation at all than some regulation that kills you. But this does not mean that you can live entirely without regulations.
'Free market' vs 'Regulation' fanatics are like naturist hippies vs hypochondriacs, neither are right. You cannot expect that clean natural living will cure all your illnesses, but you cannot go and take every medicine available either.
Plenty of karma, don't worry. However no mod points, have been posting too actively of late. If I had I would give the GP (-1, offtopic).
Why is it that leftists always mock of libertarianism with this monotonous "free market" chant? Economic freedom is *one* of the infinite liberties a person can have. The free market works admirably for what it's meant to do, but it's not a tool for everything.
The free market is *not* intended to maximize the preservation of human life. We do need some regulations for that. Of course, there are private corporations, like this one to verify that regulations are being followed, but they do not make the regulations, that's not what the "free market" is intended to do.
So, in the end, there must exist some form of governmental or non-market regulations in effect. No libertarian denies that.
You fool! You're suposed to let the free market decide! If too many people die at hospital A, just go to hospital B!
That should be true for non-life-threatening circumstances.
The satire that leftists make of libertarianism is rather stupid and preaching to the choir.
Libertarianism isn't about getting rid of all regulations and having no government at all, that would be classical communism, the ultimate goal of Marxism.
Libertarianism is about being aware that one person's liberty ends where the other person's liberty begins. It's about making those limits more or less equal to everybody. The hospital's liberty to cut corners ends where my liberty to live begins.
The free market isn't the goal of libertarians, it's just one of the consequences. And it works for its purposes which are economic in nature.
Now go back to reading Trotsky, Bakunin, and Marx, I think you missed a few chapters.
The answer might surprise you, as it is paradoxal : get rid of infant mortality. This has been proven in every developing country : the FIRST step to reducing population is to completely eliminate infant mortality
It is a fact that lower infant mortality is correlated with lower number of children per family. But the real question is which causes the other? Which came first?
I can see a clear rationale for arguing that smaller families cause lower infant mortality rates. Parents can take better care of their children if there aren't too many mouths to feed.
OTOH, I cannot see people having children as redundancy against premature death. That would imply in a long term family planning and those people have no instruction on family planning. If they had, they wouldn't have that many children.
I know a lot of people in developing countries consume insects as a staple form of food, the squirm factor for western audiences would be quite high however.
Western audiences do consume stuff that's pretty close to insects.
I guess the right way to market it would be to call it "something shrimp". Few people would to the research to find out exactly what that means.
I can just imagine a meter wide bean scanning pirates.
They feed these beans to sharks and get the most awesome gas lasers...
The fact that a document that was never classified as a secret is published is neither ironic nor a leak.
Also, and most important to me, if I have a situation where people wants regular updates(my kid deathly sick in the hospital),
it is an easy way to send them without annoying people.
I can also follow friends and family with annoying them.
Two words: identity theft.
"Here's my last picture of grandpa Jones" means your mother's maiden name was Jones.
"Here's the family in front of our new home" means the street number appears on the photo.
And so on. I don't want to spread unnecessary data about myself and my family, that's why I don't use social networks.
I'm pretty sure debt isn't transferrable like that...
Huh? WTF?
Tell me, have you heard of any recent abduction stories in the US?
No, I don't think so. That's because the aliens who invaded the US had to cut their science budget to pay their debt. No more human anatomy studies for them.