That's a lot more typing than print "Hello World".
Yes I could wrap it with a different function, but it means one more nonstandard function for other people to figure out when they look at my code.
A good programming language should provide concise standard ways for doing popular stuff.
Programming is a form of compression.
Instead of zillions of "if... then..." statements, you compress them to loops and other stuff.
Note: you don't usually compress everything to max because if some bits need to be changed later you'd have to do a lot more unpacking and repacking...
I like the sprintf style % part. But I don't like the weird rules- e.g. "A space is written before each object is (converted and) written, unless the output system believes it is positioned at the beginning of a line."
And now they change the syntax of print a lot.
Couldn't they just call it something else and keep the old weird print the way it is and thus not break so much?
Maybe consciousness is what happens when you build a world simulator using some aspects of quantum computing (for the massive parallelization with finite resources ), and then get it to recursively (and infinitely?) simulate itself and the world.
Where at the singularity/infinity is that "weirdness".:)
I disagree with the popular concept of "I think therefore I am". You don't really have to think to experience the "I am" phenomenon - whether in language or in pictures or in sensation. Hellen Keller was self-aware before she was taught symbols/language. Language makes it easier to store, recall, process and transmit thoughts - it quantizes them. If you learn another language it is easier to realize there can be thoughts that language has no words for.
The internal monologue is not the awareness itself, anymore than the characters being typed on our screens are. The monologue allows the actual "awareness" to go "yes that's the word/symbol I was thinking of" - even though it wasn't exactly thinking of it before;). Or also "Nope, that's not it".
To me it is interesting that God in Genesis 3 says "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" in response when asked for his name.
Thing is he spends most of his time talking about the "car" and not the "driver". While there's good reason for that, the latter is a greater wonder to me.
It is less surprising to me how the "car" works (though that is a wonder in itself, and also useful if we ever want to build better "car"s).
Try this: stare at a blank wall and don't think.
Your "car" is still working merrily and quietly in the background, but your "You" is still there, and you know it, whether or not your memory works or not.
So if you were born with a wreck of a "car", would your "You" will still be there? Yes/No/Depends? If it's "Depends", what does it depend on? That's what I'm curious about.
People suffering from a stroke have experienced not being able to do a lot of stuff (temporarily not understanding numbers, language etc) but still "being there" nonetheless.
But just because our "now" is based on "old" data, does it really explain why we have that "self aware" phenomenon?
If you get a computer to process old data, does that automagically cause it to have consciousness?
Would any sort of information processing do that? Or is it just certain types? Why?
Maybe computers have some form of consciousness - but we just don't know it? After all we can have a limited self awareness in dreams but at the same time have little control over what we do in those dreams and what happens?
AFAIK so far there's no scientific theory to explain "self awareness"/"consciousness", and I suspect it's the very first observation all scientists make - observation of self. Why should there be such a phenomenon in the first place?
One of my current theories of consciousness is it's the result of the mind recursively simulating/predicting itself as part of simulating/predicting the universe, and peeking into the future of what it is going to think next. It's very useful for a creature to predict the world around it, including other creatures, and it often has to predict itself.
But even if that is the case why should it cause the phenomemon we (I presume it's "we" and not just me:) ) observe? Is it because we're all somehow "cheating" and peeking into the actual future very slightly?
There is something that optical mice could do better.
I've noticed that for some optical mice, if you move them very fast, their sampling or something is not fast enough so the mouse makes a blind guess on the direction and magnitude of the move.
This is bad for some games...
The usual "ball" mice seem to better able to keep up.
The other thing would be latency. My guess is wireless mice are more likely to have higher latency than wired mice since they have to encode/modulate stuff to RF/IR and then decode/demodulate.
A few milliseconds here and there and it could add up to something significant.
What I don't like about the ball mice is they tend to accumulate gunk in the rollers.
No. If an ATM is running out of money, a notification should be sent, and someone/something should go reload it with money.
If lots of machines are running out of money, a notification should be sent so that the Bank can ask the Government for a bailout and to make hopefully confidence inspiring statements:).
", I have to inform you (and remind myself) that IA-64 a.k.a Itanic is still alive. "
I believe the term is undead.
Well, Intel did try something different. Too bad their EPIC Itanic can't fly as well as the x86 pigs with jetpacks (that also fly faster than most of the snooty RISC eagles;) ).
On the bright side it means less competition for me.
As long as my bosses are old enough to be from the "old school" they can tell the difference between me and the incoming new crap ( but not so old that they are senile or demented;) ).
I can honestly tell them that even though I am indeed crap and not that good, I'm still many times better than more than 95% of the prospective candidates. I can usually spell and write more than a few sentences without making silly mistakes. Every so often I am even capable of coherent thought and basic reasoning!
The danger of course is if the crap gets so widespread that there are no longer enough decent hirers who can tell the difference.
Lastly, there appear to be some decent chemists coming from India:
"Yes, Customer support is expensive. Dell doesn't do this."
I think Dell does customer support. But you probably have to pay extra.
I got someone to pay for the "completecover" stuff. Yes expensive. That someone soon after getting the notebook, spilled stuff on it. Dell got it fixed with no hassles.
It seems similar for the corporate stuff. In my experience they send people over to replace stuff. Sometimes it takes longer to get/convince internal IT to call Dell/IBM/whoever to start the ball rolling for getting stuff fixed (once I was without a working graphics card for weeks - the IT dept of that company I worked for was busy doing other more important stuff I presume).
If you pay the "I'm a customer drone" price, you get to talk to the "I'm the call center drone" bunch and you might manage to navigate your way through their scripts to speak to a nondrone.
There are more idiots than smart people. And Dell has clearly decided to cater for the market that includes the idiots.
And therefore they need those checklists. Because yes there will be idiots who would call support because their computer is not working and it turns out they didn't plug it in, or they did some other idiot style thing.
What would be useful is if you get to the nondrone level and the person at the other end thinks you have some clue, they can mark you in their database as "has a clue", so in future cases if you say "yes I am Mr X, I have done the usual checks, the drones can move your call up (and go handle some generic idiot's case instead).
And also if you've been an asshole they could also mark you as "asshole", and so let the staff who are better able to cope with assholes to handle your cases in the future.
AFAIK there are many ways to measure the financial status of a bank or other entity. Accounting can get somewhat subjective for some stuff (probably even more so when it involves fancy bullshit "financial instruments";) ).
And so that's why they mentioned they used "US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles" to measure the status/leverage.
They could have used some other method (and since they are German banks, German methods could be reasonable), but that would make direct comparisons harder with US banks.
The rules ARE enforceable if you keep most stuff server side, but at the expense of increased latency, higher server load and very poor user experience.
And the "poor user experience" is what a lot of people are complaining about with webapps, and that's why they are shifting stuff client side.
While you can do some stuff safely, it does make me wonder what is likely to happen after all that blurring and layers of abstraction/indirection.
Truth be said, I don't wonder at all, it's inevitable - lots of PHBs are going to insist on something stupid and thousands of cheap clueless programmers are going to do it;).
I think you're not getting the full picture or details.
If we start with 10 euros each (20 total in the world), but I control the Euro printing press and I print 20 more euros for myself (40 total in the world), I end up richer than you.
Assuming the world has the same wealth as before, your wealth has been transferred to me.
I'm not stuck with the same amount of wealth as I had before.
The price of milk may double from 2 to 4.
But you go from being able to buy 5 units of milk, to being able to only buy 2.5 units of milk.
Whereas I go from being able to buy 5 units to 7.5 units.
Now, figure out why the petrodollar is so important to the USA, and why Saudi Arabia is regarded as such a great friend of the USA.
Wealth can be transferred by the printing of money. Even if it's not wealth creation it does make someone richer.
The ones controlling the printing end up richer than the ones holding money that's worth less and less everyday. That's often good enough wealth "creation" for the Printers.
That's why it is very important to the USA that most countries in the world use US dollars for buying/selling oil, borrowing and lending money and other trade (grain, flour, DRAM, sugar etc).
That way lots of countries end up holding billions or trillions of US dollars just to buy stuff, or as a result of selling stuff.
Then when the US Gov prints US dollars (either by saying "IOU", or printing) they make the USD worth less and thus those countries end up poorer. I think of it as a way of taxing everyone else - best of all you don't even need to chase them for the money:).
The US citizens holding USD also end up poorer, but I think the normal understanding is the US Gov is supposed to hand some of the printed money to the US citizens.
It's much like Zimbabwe, where Mugabe = US Gov, and Mugabe's friends = US citizens. And the rest of Zimbabwe = the rest of the world.
Of course, maybe "Mugabe" has new friends and is no longer handing out the US citizens a decent share of the "loot".
Possibly unrelated items: Iraq was selling oil in Euro before they got invaded. After that they sold oil in USD. Iran has started an oil bourse that's not in USD...
Go figure:).
Caveat: I'm not an economics or finance expert... I don't know all that fancy math and stats stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lot more typing than print "Hello World".
... then ..." statements, you compress them to loops and other stuff.
Yes I could wrap it with a different function, but it means one more nonstandard function for other people to figure out when they look at my code.
A good programming language should provide concise standard ways for doing popular stuff.
Programming is a form of compression.
Instead of zillions of "if
Note: you don't usually compress everything to max because if some bits need to be changed later you'd have to do a lot more unpacking and repacking...
I use Yahoo search sometimes when google's search doesn't give me what I want (sometimes it doesn't). Microsoft's search isn't that bad either.
I use Yahoo mail and Yahoo messenger too every now and then.
I have a gmail account but I rarely use it.
As long as Yahoo and MS's search engines are around, Google search isn't a monopoly at all.
I think the print in python is a bit of a mess.
I like the sprintf style % part. But I don't like the weird rules- e.g. "A space is written before each object is (converted and) written, unless the output system believes it is positioned at the beginning of a line."
And now they change the syntax of print a lot.
Couldn't they just call it something else and keep the old weird print the way it is and thus not break so much?
For instance I think Perl 6 uses "say".
Maybe consciousness is what happens when you build a world simulator using some aspects of quantum computing (for the massive parallelization with finite resources ), and then get it to recursively (and infinitely?) simulate itself and the world.
:)
;). Or also "Nope, that's not it".
Where at the singularity/infinity is that "weirdness".
I disagree with the popular concept of "I think therefore I am". You don't really have to think to experience the "I am" phenomenon - whether in language or in pictures or in sensation. Hellen Keller was self-aware before she was taught symbols/language. Language makes it easier to store, recall, process and transmit thoughts - it quantizes them. If you learn another language it is easier to realize there can be thoughts that language has no words for.
The internal monologue is not the awareness itself, anymore than the characters being typed on our screens are. The monologue allows the actual "awareness" to go "yes that's the word/symbol I was thinking of" - even though it wasn't exactly thinking of it before
To me it is interesting that God in Genesis 3 says "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" in response when asked for his name.
Thing is he spends most of his time talking about the "car" and not the "driver". While there's good reason for that, the latter is a greater wonder to me.
It is less surprising to me how the "car" works (though that is a wonder in itself, and also useful if we ever want to build better "car"s).
Try this: stare at a blank wall and don't think.
Your "car" is still working merrily and quietly in the background, but your "You" is still there, and you know it, whether or not your memory works or not.
So if you were born with a wreck of a "car", would your "You" will still be there? Yes/No/Depends? If it's "Depends", what does it depend on? That's what I'm curious about.
People suffering from a stroke have experienced not being able to do a lot of stuff (temporarily not understanding numbers, language etc) but still "being there" nonetheless.
By predicting, I mean predicting.
As I said: it is useful for a creature to be able to predict what might happen next.
And one of the ways is for it to have a model of its environment in its mind.
If you live amongst other creatures, it is useful for you to be able to predict what other creatures might do, and make better choices.
If some of those other creatures also are able to do predictions, you have to predict them predicting you, and thus you have to predict yourself.
But just because our "now" is based on "old" data, does it really explain why we have that "self aware" phenomenon?
If you get a computer to process old data, does that automagically cause it to have consciousness?
Would any sort of information processing do that? Or is it just certain types? Why?
Maybe computers have some form of consciousness - but we just don't know it? After all we can have a limited self awareness in dreams but at the same time have little control over what we do in those dreams and what happens?
I also would like to see how well they handle and avoid fragmentation.
The real problem with reiserfs: vendor lock-in.
The G7 is also rather expensive IMO.
:).
So to answer the OP's: "there's not all that much you can do to set it apart from the rest of the pack"
Something like the G7 but a lot cheaper would set it apart.
Being a wired mouse is fine. The wires don't bother me much, expensive does bother me
What if more than one person sees the same thing (as "same" as witnesses can get), but nothing shows up in the photo?
AFAIK so far there's no scientific theory to explain "self awareness"/"consciousness", and I suspect it's the very first observation all scientists make - observation of self. Why should there be such a phenomenon in the first place?
:) ) observe? Is it because we're all somehow "cheating" and peeking into the actual future very slightly?
One of my current theories of consciousness is it's the result of the mind recursively simulating/predicting itself as part of simulating/predicting the universe, and peeking into the future of what it is going to think next. It's very useful for a creature to predict the world around it, including other creatures, and it often has to predict itself.
But even if that is the case why should it cause the phenomemon we (I presume it's "we" and not just me
There is something that optical mice could do better.
I've noticed that for some optical mice, if you move them very fast, their sampling or something is not fast enough so the mouse makes a blind guess on the direction and magnitude of the move.
This is bad for some games...
The usual "ball" mice seem to better able to keep up.
The other thing would be latency. My guess is wireless mice are more likely to have higher latency than wired mice since they have to encode/modulate stuff to RF/IR and then decode/demodulate.
A few milliseconds here and there and it could add up to something significant.
What I don't like about the ball mice is they tend to accumulate gunk in the rollers.
How about stuff like zippers? YKK makes a lot of them per year.
:).
I sure hope the zippers on my clothes are long term products, would be a problem otherwise
Same goes for stuff like screws, nails, nuts, bolts etc.
No. If an ATM is running out of money, a notification should be sent, and someone/something should go reload it with money.
:).
If lots of machines are running out of money, a notification should be sent so that the Bank can ask the Government for a bailout and to make hopefully confidence inspiring statements
", I have to inform you (and remind myself) that IA-64 a.k.a Itanic is still alive. "
;) ).
I believe the term is undead.
Well, Intel did try something different. Too bad their EPIC Itanic can't fly as well as the x86 pigs with jetpacks (that also fly faster than most of the snooty RISC eagles
On the bright side it means less competition for me.
As long as my bosses are old enough to be from the "old school" they can tell the difference between me and the incoming new crap ( but not so old that they are senile or demented ;) ).
I can honestly tell them that even though I am indeed crap and not that good, I'm still many times better than more than 95% of the prospective candidates. I can usually spell and write more than a few sentences without making silly mistakes. Every so often I am even capable of coherent thought and basic reasoning!
The danger of course is if the crap gets so widespread that there are no longer enough decent hirers who can tell the difference.
Lastly, there appear to be some decent chemists coming from India:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2005-11/11-year-quest-create-disappearing-colored-bubbles
Yes the US guy had the idea and drive (which counts for a lot), but in the end he needed the Indian guy to create the dye.
"Yes, Customer support is expensive. Dell doesn't do this."
I think Dell does customer support. But you probably have to pay extra.
I got someone to pay for the "completecover" stuff. Yes expensive. That someone soon after getting the notebook, spilled stuff on it. Dell got it fixed with no hassles.
It seems similar for the corporate stuff. In my experience they send people over to replace stuff. Sometimes it takes longer to get/convince internal IT to call Dell/IBM/whoever to start the ball rolling for getting stuff fixed (once I was without a working graphics card for weeks - the IT dept of that company I worked for was busy doing other more important stuff I presume).
If you pay the "I'm a customer drone" price, you get to talk to the "I'm the call center drone" bunch and you might manage to navigate your way through their scripts to speak to a nondrone.
Maybe he attaches EULAs on all his cash :).
There are more idiots than smart people. And Dell has clearly decided to cater for the market that includes the idiots.
:).
And therefore they need those checklists. Because yes there will be idiots who would call support because their computer is not working and it turns out they didn't plug it in, or they did some other idiot style thing.
What would be useful is if you get to the nondrone level and the person at the other end thinks you have some clue, they can mark you in their database as "has a clue", so in future cases if you say "yes I am Mr X, I have done the usual checks, the drones can move your call up (and go handle some generic idiot's case instead).
And also if you've been an asshole they could also mark you as "asshole", and so let the staff who are better able to cope with assholes to handle your cases in the future.
I'd probably be marked asshole, oh well
Note: I am not an accountant.
AFAIK there are many ways to measure the financial status of a bank or other entity. Accounting can get somewhat subjective for some stuff (probably even more so when it involves fancy bullshit "financial instruments" ;) ).
And so that's why they mentioned they used "US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles" to measure the status/leverage.
They could have used some other method (and since they are German banks, German methods could be reasonable), but that would make direct comparisons harder with US banks.
Here are some differences between the German and US accounting principles:
http://www.sap.com/germany/about/investor/reports/gb2006/en/notes/36-significant-differences-between-german-and-u.s.-accounting-princ.html
Anyway, I read:
"its leverage, which at 40 times "
as the leverage is 40 times (40:1)
And:
"under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, "
That 40:1 leverage was measured using US GAAP, not the German equivalent of "GAAP".
I don't see it reasonable to interpret: "which at 40 times under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles"
as "40 times the leverage of an average US bank".
Which appears to be what you believe.
Women can even control/influence the use of the wealth way before their rich billionaire husbands die.
Take Melinda Gates for example.
That's actually the point.
;).
The rules ARE enforceable if you keep most stuff server side, but at the expense of increased latency, higher server load and very poor user experience.
And the "poor user experience" is what a lot of people are complaining about with webapps, and that's why they are shifting stuff client side.
While you can do some stuff safely, it does make me wonder what is likely to happen after all that blurring and layers of abstraction/indirection.
Truth be said, I don't wonder at all, it's inevitable - lots of PHBs are going to insist on something stupid and thousands of cheap clueless programmers are going to do it
I think you're not getting the full picture or details.
If we start with 10 euros each (20 total in the world), but I control the Euro printing press and I print 20 more euros for myself (40 total in the world), I end up richer than you.
Assuming the world has the same wealth as before, your wealth has been transferred to me.
I'm not stuck with the same amount of wealth as I had before.
The price of milk may double from 2 to 4.
But you go from being able to buy 5 units of milk, to being able to only buy 2.5 units of milk.
Whereas I go from being able to buy 5 units to 7.5 units.
Now, figure out why the petrodollar is so important to the USA, and why Saudi Arabia is regarded as such a great friend of the USA.
Wealth can be transferred by the printing of money. Even if it's not wealth creation it does make someone richer.
:).
:).
The ones controlling the printing end up richer than the ones holding money that's worth less and less everyday. That's often good enough wealth "creation" for the Printers.
That's why it is very important to the USA that most countries in the world use US dollars for buying/selling oil, borrowing and lending money and other trade (grain, flour, DRAM, sugar etc).
That way lots of countries end up holding billions or trillions of US dollars just to buy stuff, or as a result of selling stuff.
Then when the US Gov prints US dollars (either by saying "IOU", or printing) they make the USD worth less and thus those countries end up poorer. I think of it as a way of taxing everyone else - best of all you don't even need to chase them for the money
The US citizens holding USD also end up poorer, but I think the normal understanding is the US Gov is supposed to hand some of the printed money to the US citizens.
It's much like Zimbabwe, where Mugabe = US Gov, and Mugabe's friends = US citizens. And the rest of Zimbabwe = the rest of the world.
Of course, maybe "Mugabe" has new friends and is no longer handing out the US citizens a decent share of the "loot".
Possibly unrelated items: Iraq was selling oil in Euro before they got invaded. After that they sold oil in USD. Iran has started an oil bourse that's not in USD...
Go figure
Caveat: I'm not an economics or finance expert... I don't know all that fancy math and stats stuff.