Actually, although they knew there was something called a "Bird Of Prey," they thought it was an operational vehicle and not a test program. And that it was a variable-geometry plane.
Of course, such a vehicle may still exist. Who knows?
Uh, the US never did support the Taliban. The Taliban only came into power after the US had cut support for those people we were supporting in Afganistan, because the Soviet Union fell. Most of those people were in the NA; the person most responsible for kicking the Russians out, Massoud, had been assasinated by the Taliban the weekend before 9/11. The Taliban didn't even start seizing power there until much later, around 94/95 or so, and were mainly backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
I thought the main problem with Farnsworth was that RCA basically defrauded the patent office and took credit for his invention.
I'd suggest, given recent events with things like the Skunk Works, which started out efficient but is now nothing but, that small teams are more important than large teams.
Have you considered that maybe that was the Chinese objective? To get you to cooperate in the censorship of their subjects? And all it took was a couple hundred "Make Money Fast!" emails. Gee, you're easy to subvert.
Re:Language neutrality
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Everyone talks about.NET's supposed
language neutrality, but based on what I've
read so far, it's only language neutral if
your language is c# or close to it.
However, maybe they should repeat
the claim another million times; it worked
with getting people to think Windows
was secure.
"CLR lacks continuations"... so does JVM
"CLR requires static inheritence"... so does JVM
"CLR lacks multiple dispatch..." etc
I certainly think that the CLR could stand the criticism and have its hype deflated, but I'm not finding a lot to recommend the JVM... Sun doesn't even acknowledge, much less support, other languages on the JVM. [...] I also note that there are languages very not like C# available for.NET, like haskell and scheme.
Actually, you're wrong. Sun doesn't support other languages on the JVM because it wasn't designed to support other languages. It was merely meant to support Java. But the flip side is that they don't pretend to support other languages. No matter what Microsoft tells you, the CLR was meant to run C#; IF they had wanted to support (for example) scheme in it, it would look much differently. Now there are, I suppose, scheme implementations for.NET, but based on what I'm reading so far, they lack core scheme features.
Basically, scheme and haskell AREN'T available for the CLR; the intersection of C# and haskell, or scheme, are available, with haskell or scheme style syntax, but it isn't the same as real scheme. There's more to a language than syntax; that's the whole point of scheme and lisp. But the marketing literature for the CLR defines another language by its syntax. A clustermessup like this, with the marketing power of Microsoft behind it, trying to make it the new binary programming standard, scares me.
Quoting Bill Joy or James Gosling
isn't going to give you an unbiased view of
.net
What if.NET doesn't really deserve to
rule the universe, in spite of the fact that it's
created by Microsoft, which could literally make
z80 assembly opcodes the standard programming
language of the future if they wanted to?
Whatever happened to the concept that companies
are supposed to serve the customer, not the customer serve the company by promoting their latest kludge?
Of course, there's still the question of how much
stuff you'll have to boost to orbit in order to
build the cable. The cable is capable of solving
space transportation problems only after we're
three or so orders of magnitude better at it than
we are now. And therefore not of interest.
Well, there's only one solution for
that. Shut down the electrical grid.
I suspect that every other artificial emitter
in Mendocino emits an order of magnitude less
power than their power grid, but I don't have
any numbers handy.
sure it's great news that this is happening, but I fear many people have forgotten something, It's because of companies such as Microsoft that the US economy is doing as well as it is. So many people hate MS and want them to die out of business but this destruction would only harm our economy.
And it's because of Hancom that South Korea
actually has a word processor that handles
their native language. About two years ago
Microsoft tried to buy Hancom with the intent
of taking their native-Korean-language office
suite off the market and replace
it with MS Office (which isn't nearly as
functional in Korean). The sale was blocked
by the Korean government. So you think M$
should make decisions that make other people
suffer for its own business gains, but you
act suprised when people hate it? Microsoft
has earned the hate of many people,
both in Korea and the US.
Do you think it's
good for US business to have to keep spending
billions of dollars fighting off the Outlook
Virus Of The Week? I can't afford to take the
time off of real work to keep trying to keep
the work M$ computers virus free. Is it supposed
to be a comfort to me and the millions of small
business owners like me who have substantial
productivity drains from Microsoft software that
Bill Gates is making lots of money? To be blunt,
if you think M$ is more important to the economy than ten thousand randomly chosen small businesses, you're making the same sorts of mistakes the Soviets did. Personally, I don't want the US to go the way of the Soviet Union.
I think the plan is they sell it to the usual
suspect cost-plus contractors they work with already
like Boeing or LockMart and then buy back the shuttle
launches from them. This isn't going to save any
money, it's just an accounting trick.
It isn't even real privatization. It'll still
remain a government run and funded program after
it's done.
One of the reasons given was
something along the lines of "DV is old
and going to be replaced soon."
Replaced by what? I don't think usb2
is going to the trick. DV is what's on my
computer, and camcorder, now. And what's
going to be on the computer I'm about to
buy. There's nothing else available. I
haven't seen a camcorder with usb-2,
and I doubt I will.
And what do countries that have
attempted communism have to do with Marx's
writings?
Simply that a lot of the things that got
criticized by Marx as "bourgeois sentimentality"
consisted of a lot of the infrastructure
necessary to keep a country from degenerating
into totalitarianism. Take, for instance, the
Supreme Court, which declared the Communications
Decency Act unconstitutional.
And for yet another example, look at what
happened with the Mexican revolution: Villa and
Zapata were killed, and you wound up with rule
by an "Institutional Revolutionary Party" made
up of a lot of the people who were members of the
government who were fighting them, and they hung
on to power for eighty years or so.
On the whole, Slashdot is too full of
people who think they're educated or smart because
they can write perl scripts but know virtually no
history, and then read
The Communist Manifesto
and then think they do know history
and political science as well. I wish they'd get
a grip, and read some Eric Hoffer; they'd realize
that they fit very closely the sort of people
totalitarian revolutions like to use
and throw away afterwards. Or some Will Durant.
Or anything to get a real education, instead of
pretending the leftist pablum floating around the
nation's school system counts.
If you tried to follow the guidelines
of the Manifesto, chances are you'd wind up
in a much worse situation. Look at all the
countries that label themselves as communist:
they weren't better for the workers than
capitalist countries, they were worse. The
problem here is overzealous use of state power;
giving total economic control over to the
government does nothing to make it better, and
everything to make it worse. And before you protest that that's not the way you'd do it,
remember, the way you'd do it is never the way
the communist revolutions actually turn out.
California's electric deregulation
was passed by a Republican state congress.
Actually, it wasn't. The governor at the time was Pete Wilson, a Republican (I don't know why he gets to claim that; most republicans agree with him on very little) but the State legislature was run by the democrats at the time, and the lieutenant governor was (suprise!) Gray Davis. I'd like to find what he was saying at the time about deregulation... I suppose it would be embarrassing to both sides.
Yes, a lot of other countries signed it,
but only a small fraction of them would have
to do anyting in order to abide by
it. It dramatically affects currently-industrialized
nations but doesn't affect others, including
nations we have a large trade deficit with.
Which means that it doesn't do a damn thing for
carbon dioxide emmisions, just offers to move them
from here to nations we already have trade deficits
with. Which is why the Senate refused to ratify it by a 95-0 vote. After that happened, Clinton was willing to pretend the treaty was still going to happen. Bush, OTOH, has simply stopped pretending there's a snowball's chance in hell of ratification. BTW, in the last stages of negotiation, Japan only approved the treaty when they got exemptions from the enforcement mechanism. What's the point of the treaty anymore?
You know, in a way, this defeats the
purpose of the alt.binaries groups, which
exist mainly to keep the stuff that floods
the alt.* groups from flooding the more
mainstream news hierarchies instead .
This will perform the marvellous feat
of getting the copyrighted material out of
the alt. groups and into rec.arts where they
really, really aren't wanted. Thank
you, Pacbell.
It seems that forth is the last remaining
example of a language being used in a system where
everything, from the chip design to the OS, is
tailored to work with a single language. Back in
the 80's, there were similar systems written in
lisp, but there are no more. While there are occasional
proposals for a scheme processor floating around, nothing's really come of it. OTOH, a lot of the programs I run in linux seem to have their own separate scheme/lisp interpreter implementation. I could be running gnumeric (using guile), sawfish (rep), siag (siod), the Gimp (I forget what its scheme is called), and emacs (elisp) at the same time, which seems to be a wasteful setup.
Do you think there's a place for a scheme-based OS, and would your new project be useful for such a project?
I believe any given molecule circulates the entire system in a few seconds.)
Actually, this is such a vast oversimplification it isn't even funny. At _that_ level of simulation, you're talking about some 10 to the 28 power particles.
Assuming each particle takes a byte to simulate (and
I'm being generous) it would take some 10^19
_gigabytes_ of ram to store state information for them all. And I'm
not even going to guess how much interaction cross-referencing will need to be done when you actually run
the simulation.
Slashdot has way too many people who think they have the answer to everything just because they can write spaghetti code in an obfucated language like Perl. I think the post I'm responding to is a perfect example. (Actually, I'm probably off by a factor of ten, by neglecting atoms that aren't hydrogen, but hydrogen accounts for more than half the discrete atoms in the body, so it's not far off. It'll do for estimating the amount of memory to within an order of magnitude.
But you think it's progress that the government
went from going to the moon to mounting "expeditions"
to low earth orbit? That's not progress, that's
regress. The government also does all it can to
make sure the price of space launch stays high.
They manipulate the market, and basically say to
investors wanting to invest in non-government-design
bureau launchers (i.e. companies besides LockMart
and Boeing, which are more like communist design bureaus like Sukhoi than private companies... I take that back, Sukhoi is a lot more like a private company these days) that any reduction is impossible. If that's the way you want healthcare to go, then try not to screw it up for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Space shuttle launches cost around 500 million
apiece. They usually run six launches a year
for around 3.2 billion total program budget
for year.
Ripped from Star Trek?
When was the last time Star Trek
had a "rob a hospital" episode?
Actually, although they knew there was something
called a "Bird Of Prey," they thought it was
an operational vehicle and not a test program.
And that it was a variable-geometry plane.
Of course, such a vehicle may still exist.
Who knows?
Uh, the US never did support the Taliban. The Taliban only came into power after the US had
cut support for those people we were supporting
in Afganistan, because the Soviet Union fell.
Most of those people were in the NA; the
person most responsible for kicking the Russians
out, Massoud, had been assasinated by the Taliban
the weekend before 9/11. The Taliban didn't even
start seizing power there until much later, around
94/95 or so, and were mainly backed by Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia.
I thought the main problem with Farnsworth
was that RCA basically defrauded the patent
office and took credit for his invention.
I'd suggest, given recent events with things
like the Skunk Works, which started out efficient
but is now nothing but, that small teams are
more important than large teams.
Have you considered that maybe that was
the Chinese objective? To get you to cooperate
in the censorship of their subjects? And all it
took was a couple hundred "Make Money Fast!"
emails. Gee, you're easy to subvert.
language neutrality, but based on what I've
read so far, it's only language neutral if
your language is c# or close to it.
However, maybe they should repeat
the claim another million times; it worked
with getting people to think Windows
was secure.
Actually, you're wrong. Sun doesn't support other languages on the JVM because it wasn't designed to support other languages. It was merely meant to support Java. But the flip side is that they don't pretend to support other languages. No matter what Microsoft tells you, the CLR was meant to run C#; IF they had wanted to support (for example) scheme in it, it would look much differently. Now there are, I suppose, scheme implementations for .NET, but based on what I'm reading so far, they lack core scheme features.
Basically, scheme and haskell AREN'T available for the CLR; the intersection of C# and haskell, or scheme, are available, with haskell or scheme style syntax, but it isn't the same as real scheme. There's more to a language than syntax; that's the whole point of scheme and lisp. But the marketing literature for the CLR defines another language by its syntax. A clustermessup like this, with the marketing power of Microsoft behind it, trying to make it the new binary programming standard, scares me.
What if .NET doesn't really deserve to
rule the universe, in spite of the fact that it's
created by Microsoft, which could literally make
z80 assembly opcodes the standard programming
language of the future if they wanted to?
Whatever happened to the concept that companies
are supposed to serve the customer, not the customer serve the company by promoting their latest kludge?
Of course, there's still the question of how much
stuff you'll have to boost to orbit in order to
build the cable. The cable is capable of solving
space transportation problems only after we're
three or so orders of magnitude better at it than
we are now. And therefore not of interest.
So 60 Hz is a problem to these people?
Well, there's only one solution for
that. Shut down the electrical grid.
I suspect that every other artificial emitter
in Mendocino emits an order of magnitude less
power than their power grid, but I don't have
any numbers handy.
And it's because of Hancom that South Korea
actually has a word processor that handles
their native language. About two years ago
Microsoft tried to buy Hancom with the intent
of taking their native-Korean-language office
suite off the market and replace
it with MS Office (which isn't nearly as
functional in Korean). The sale was blocked
by the Korean government. So you think M$
should make decisions that make other people
suffer for its own business gains, but you
act suprised when people hate it? Microsoft
has earned the hate of many people,
both in Korea and the US.
Do you think it's
good for US business to have to keep spending
billions of dollars fighting off the Outlook
Virus Of The Week? I can't afford to take the
time off of real work to keep trying to keep
the work M$ computers virus free. Is it supposed
to be a comfort to me and the millions of small
business owners like me who have substantial
productivity drains from Microsoft software that
Bill Gates is making lots of money? To be blunt,
if you think M$ is more important to the economy than ten thousand randomly chosen small businesses, you're making the same sorts of mistakes the Soviets did. Personally, I don't want the US to go the way of the Soviet Union.
gone back to nn. Especially since the
debian nn is finally functional again.
So scoring isn't as finely graduated as other
newsreaders. It still kicks butt, IMHO.
I think the plan is they sell it to the usual
suspect cost-plus contractors they work with already
like Boeing or LockMart and then buy back the shuttle
launches from them. This isn't going to save any
money, it's just an accounting trick.
It isn't even real privatization. It'll still
remain a government run and funded program after
it's done.
Replaced by what? I don't think usb2
is going to the trick. DV is what's on my
computer, and camcorder, now. And what's
going to be on the computer I'm about to
buy. There's nothing else available. I
haven't seen a camcorder with usb-2,
and I doubt I will.
My bogosity meter just went off.
Simply that a lot of the things that got
criticized by Marx as "bourgeois sentimentality"
consisted of a lot of the infrastructure
necessary to keep a country from degenerating
into totalitarianism. Take, for instance, the
Supreme Court, which declared the Communications
Decency Act unconstitutional.
And for yet another example, look at what happened with the Mexican revolution: Villa and Zapata were killed, and you wound up with rule by an "Institutional Revolutionary Party" made up of a lot of the people who were members of the government who were fighting them, and they hung on to power for eighty years or so.
On the whole, Slashdot is too full of people who think they're educated or smart because they can write perl scripts but know virtually no history, and then read
- The Communist Manifesto
and then think they do know history and political science as well. I wish they'd get a grip, and read some Eric Hoffer; they'd realize that they fit very closely the sort of people totalitarian revolutions like to use and throw away afterwards. Or some Will Durant. Or anything to get a real education, instead of pretending the leftist pablum floating around the nation's school system counts.If you tried to follow the guidelines
of the Manifesto, chances are you'd wind up
in a much worse situation. Look at all the
countries that label themselves as communist:
they weren't better for the workers than
capitalist countries, they were worse. The
problem here is overzealous use of state power;
giving total economic control over to the
government does nothing to make it better, and
everything to make it worse. And before you protest that that's not the way you'd do it,
remember, the way you'd do it is never the way
the communist revolutions actually turn out.
Actually, it wasn't. The governor at the time was Pete Wilson, a Republican (I don't know why he gets to claim that; most republicans agree with him on very little) but the State legislature was run by the democrats at the time, and the lieutenant governor was (suprise!) Gray Davis. I'd like to find what he was saying at the time about deregulation... I suppose it would be embarrassing to both sides.
Yes, a lot of other countries signed it,
but only a small fraction of them would have
to do anyting in order to abide by
it. It dramatically affects currently-industrialized
nations but doesn't affect others, including
nations we have a large trade deficit with.
Which means that it doesn't do a damn thing for
carbon dioxide emmisions, just offers to move them
from here to nations we already have trade deficits
with. Which is why the Senate refused to ratify it by a 95-0 vote. After that happened, Clinton was willing to pretend the treaty was still going to happen. Bush, OTOH, has simply stopped pretending there's a snowball's chance in hell of ratification. BTW, in the last stages of negotiation, Japan only approved the treaty when they got exemptions from the enforcement mechanism. What's the point of the treaty anymore?
You know, in a way, this defeats the
purpose of the alt.binaries groups, which
exist mainly to keep the stuff that floods
the alt.* groups from flooding the more
mainstream news hierarchies instead .
This will perform the marvellous feat
of getting the copyrighted material out of
the alt. groups and into rec.arts where they
really, really aren't wanted. Thank
you, Pacbell.
It seems that forth is the last remaining
example of a language being used in a system where
everything, from the chip design to the OS, is
tailored to work with a single language. Back in
the 80's, there were similar systems written in
lisp, but there are no more. While there are occasional
proposals for a scheme processor floating around, nothing's really come of it. OTOH, a lot of the programs I run in linux seem to have their own separate scheme/lisp interpreter implementation. I could be running gnumeric (using guile), sawfish (rep), siag (siod), the Gimp (I forget what its scheme is called), and emacs (elisp) at the same time, which seems to be a wasteful setup.
Do you think there's a place for a scheme-based OS, and would your new project be useful for such a project?
Actually, this is such a vast oversimplification it isn't even funny. At _that_ level of simulation, you're talking about some 10 to the 28 power particles.
Assuming each particle takes a byte to simulate (and
I'm being generous) it would take some 10^19
_gigabytes_ of ram to store state information for them all. And I'm
not even going to guess how much interaction cross-referencing will need to be done when you actually run
the simulation.
Slashdot has way too many people who think they have the answer to everything just because they can write spaghetti code in an obfucated language like Perl. I think the post I'm responding to is a perfect example. (Actually, I'm probably off by a factor of ten, by neglecting atoms that aren't hydrogen, but hydrogen accounts for more than half the discrete atoms in the body, so it's not far off. It'll do for estimating the amount of memory to within an order of magnitude.
But you think it's progress that the government
went from going to the moon to mounting "expeditions"
to low earth orbit? That's not progress, that's
regress. The government also does all it can to
make sure the price of space launch stays high.
They manipulate the market, and basically say to
investors wanting to invest in non-government-design
bureau launchers (i.e. companies besides LockMart
and Boeing, which are more like communist design bureaus like Sukhoi than private companies... I take that back, Sukhoi is a lot more like a private company these days) that any reduction is impossible. If that's the way you want healthcare to go, then try not to screw it up for the rest of us.