For more than a hundred years, millions of cars have shared the roads, driven by people who prioritize their own safety in an emergency, because self-preservation is part of human nature. Around that, codes and conventions have been built. That assumption is baked in every piece of existing infrastructure and equipment, and it's baked in the way human drivers that will soon share the roads with AIs, react to circumstances and the environment. It would actually be unsafe to turn around that assumption for part of the vehicles on the road.
My advice would be to go to a Microsoft store, a brick and mortar one if there's such a thing around where you live, or http://store.microsoft.com otherwise. It's a one-stop display of the best models for each niche and market segment. The redundancy will be very reduced and all the non-competitive models will be filtered out. And when you buy from them, you get your laptop with a custom system install without the brand bloat/crapware, which enhances the out-of-the-box experience considerably.
By registering a Starbucks card and buying with it once a month, customers already got 2 hrs/day of free wifi with the AT&T hotspots in Starbucks coffeeshops, and I'm pretty sure I occasionaly stayed longer than that without being disconnected. Also most of the Starbucks in my area are, for example, Verizon hotspots that could be used by Verizon customers, and I noticed that because I am one, it could also apply to other ISPs.
...of a functional language, it is simply Microsoft's offering of a functional language. The former statement sounds like it's one of the dozens of functional languages fostered in academia, for academia to play with. The whole difference here is that, as of Visual Studio 2010, F# becomes a fully productized and supported language in the.NET world. That's really what's exciting for functional language geeks, because never before a real, modern functional language of the generation built in academia in the 90s, like OCaml and Haskell, had such a mainstream backing.
I really don't understand why Silicon Valley type geeks get so excited about the alleged advent of "free" and "standard" web technologies such as HTML5 and SVG. First, as this story illustrates, these are not "free". More importantly, these are not "standard". SVG for example has existed as a finalized, commitee underwritted standard for more than eleven years now, yet not a single browser supports more than a subset of it, and each a different subset. Even if it had been supported by IE from the beginning (Adobe doesn't even bother to support their plug-in btw), web developpers would have faced the pain of making their app working across browser, which is bad enough currently with the JS situtation.
Instead of having these commitee designed pseudo "standard" existing in abstract document and leaving it up to multiple browser and platforms to implement their own interpretation of it, I much prefer the model in which a few vendors develop mature plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight that are guaranteeded to work the same whatever they're plugged into. Yes these are "proprietary" but so are your OS and drivers if you run Windows or MacOSX, so is the design of your CPU and GPU, etc.
Better having working platforms which empower a multitude of developpers to get working stuff out to the public than abstract, broken chimeras that burden developers with absurd compatibility and licensing issues.
Ponder over the original story and the paradox that the FOSSest browser out there might be actually better off loading a proprietary Flash or SL plug in than implement a "Free" HTML5 "standard"
Reminds me of basic training in the army in the 70s. A projection screen is rolled around two rotating vertical cylinders, one on the left and one on the right, therefore forming a "double layer screen". A movie is projected on the front of the screen and light also shines from the back. The trainee shoots at the screen, where the movie representing the advancing enemy is running. At the "bang", the movie projector freezes the frame and we can see light shining from the back through the two aligned holes in the front and back screens. The instructor can determine whether it's a hit and then the cylinders are rotated so that the front and back holes are not aligned anymore and the impact disappears, and the exercise continues.
That's just ideological drivel. The point is, SVG is a " standard " with a nice w3c.org - hosted spec and a nice diversified, academy-industry panel of contributors, but the fact remains, that in the 10 years since it became a standard, nobody really cares. Even browsers that support it officially only support subsets of it. The pragmatic reality is that it's a standard only in name, not in fact. If you want something with a clean, complete, consistent documentation describing a real, working, complete, multi-platform implementation, then what you call " proprietary" solutions are actually the way to go. Read the actual license terms for them and you'll see there's actually NOTHING that they prevent you to do, that you'll likely to have any interest in doing.
Why "don't you get much choice about using an IDE" on Windows ? There's nothing you can do on Unix-style boxes that you cannot do on Windows. Just download the Windows SDK for free from the Microsoft Download website, it comes with the command line VC++ compiler, and then install VIM or EMACS and ther you go, you can feel right at home.
That since most of the cost resides in doing something useful with the data (completely producing the images), the time and talent of the people that are _in_ the suits, etc, the producers really don't give a frak that their motion capture system costs $1000, $15000 or even $100000. What they want is something that is proved to work, that technicians are familiar with, and that you can readily rent by the hour along with the facility it's located in. So thank you Media Lab for another useless gadget.
Word uses a paragraph composing algorithm that is at least as sophisticated as TeX's. Actually, Knuth's published papers ARE the basis of it. It's otherwise much more sophisticated in its supports of bidirectional, vertical and mixed vertical/horizontal text layouts, and even more so in table composition and mixing text with graphics.
The problem with TeX and LaTeX, beyond the fact that it they have never got a frontend that would put them within grasp of non-technical users, is that actually their typographical references are pretty old themselves and date back to an era dominated by the printed book. Even shoeing it in the constraints of the periodic scientific publications with its multi-column layouts and other constraints has, back in the days around 1990, involved significant overhead development and hacking of the platform. With the new dominance of on-screen reading, dynamic composition, rendering as slides, hyperlinking, mixing with graphics, it's getting less and less competitive.
This only applies to existing air defense systems. There's around two dozen nations who have the capability to develop a specific weapon against such a blimp on a relatively short notice, and not all of them are US allies.
Government regulation is like poison. Most of the time you're better off without taking any and then you find yourself in circumstances where it's actually better for you to take some and you call it chemo.
Me : type "IDE to SATA power adapter" Me : click on "price : low to high" Me : click on "Add to Cart" Me : click on "Checkout" Me : click on "Use registered credit card xxxx-xxxx1234" Me : click on "Use registered address" Me : click on "confirm purchase"
And that is so complicated only because certain people have patented certain things.
That's one of the main reason I didn't switch. The zoom implementation was useless, and I always use zoom to fill my widescreen monitor.
Unfortunately I also don't like very much the "single address and search box" concept, but maybe I can get used to that after all so I guess I'm going to give it another try.
Yes functional languages are very much at odds with many things, that's why their acceptance is limited, despite many obvious advantages, which revolve the fact that's it's extremely difficult to write bugs with them. On the other hands they are well suited to other domains, such as compilers, document processing (XSLT for example), and all sorts of data processing, i.e. in the financial engineering sector.
Their shortcomings are addressed in different ways : introducing state in them and transforming them into hybrid languages, for example. This bastardization process is exemplified by Microsoft's F# project.
On the other hands, languages like Haskell try to deal with state in a clean, more theoretical, by incorporating side effects into the typing system.
I love functional programming but let's face it, computers are state machines and you cannot really program them without understanding how programs modify their state. Hoare. Dijkstra. Read them. Embrace them. Feel the pain of bending your mind around them.
Slashdot Mirror
For more than a hundred years, millions of cars have shared the roads, driven by people who prioritize their own safety in an emergency, because self-preservation is part of human nature. Around that, codes and conventions have been built. That assumption is baked in every piece of existing infrastructure and equipment, and it's baked in the way human drivers that will soon share the roads with AIs, react to circumstances and the environment. It would actually be unsafe to turn around that assumption for part of the vehicles on the road.
Best Buy ordered 64000 units, but only 23000 were delivered.
My advice would be to go to a Microsoft store, a brick and mortar one if there's such a thing around where you live, or http://store.microsoft.com otherwise. It's a one-stop display of the best models for each niche and market segment. The redundancy will be very reduced and all the non-competitive models will be filtered out. And when you buy from them, you get your laptop with a custom system install without the brand bloat/crapware, which enhances the out-of-the-box experience considerably.
By registering a Starbucks card and buying with it once a month, customers already got 2 hrs/day of free wifi with the AT&T hotspots in Starbucks coffeeshops, and I'm pretty sure I occasionaly stayed longer than that without being disconnected. Also most of the Starbucks in my area are, for example, Verizon hotspots that could be used by Verizon customers, and I noticed that because I am one, it could also apply to other ISPs.
...of a functional language, it is simply Microsoft's offering of a functional language. The former statement sounds like it's one of the dozens of functional languages fostered in academia, for academia to play with. The whole difference here is that, as of Visual Studio 2010, F# becomes a fully productized and supported language in the .NET world. That's really what's exciting for functional language geeks, because never before a real, modern functional language of the generation built in academia in the 90s, like OCaml and Haskell, had such a mainstream backing.
I really don't understand why Silicon Valley type geeks get so excited about the alleged advent of "free" and "standard" web technologies such as HTML5 and SVG. First, as this story illustrates, these are not "free". More importantly, these are not "standard". SVG for example has existed as a finalized, commitee underwritted standard for more than eleven years now, yet not a single browser supports more than a subset of it, and each a different subset. Even if it had been supported by IE from the beginning (Adobe doesn't even bother to support their plug-in btw), web developpers would have faced the pain of making their app working across browser, which is bad enough currently with the JS situtation.
Instead of having these commitee designed pseudo "standard" existing in abstract document and leaving it up to multiple browser and platforms to implement their own interpretation of it, I much prefer the model in which a few vendors develop mature plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight that are guaranteeded to work the same whatever they're plugged into. Yes these are "proprietary" but so are your OS and drivers if you run Windows or MacOSX, so is the design of your CPU and GPU, etc.
Better having working platforms which empower a multitude of developpers to get working stuff out to the public than abstract, broken chimeras that burden developers with absurd compatibility and licensing issues.
Ponder over the original story and the paradox that the FOSSest browser out there might be actually better off loading a proprietary Flash or SL plug in than implement a "Free" HTML5 "standard"
Nobody gives a hoot about how " high performance applications " do on netbooks.
Reminds me of basic training in the army in the 70s. A projection screen is rolled around two rotating vertical cylinders, one on the left and one on the right, therefore forming a "double layer screen". A movie is projected on the front of the screen and light also shines from the back. The trainee shoots at the screen, where the movie representing the advancing enemy is running. At the "bang", the movie projector freezes the frame and we can see light shining from the back through the two aligned holes in the front and back screens. The instructor can determine whether it's a hit and then the cylinders are rotated so that the front and back holes are not aligned anymore and the impact disappears, and the exercise continues.
That's just ideological drivel. The point is, SVG is a " standard " with a nice w3c.org - hosted spec and a nice diversified, academy-industry panel of contributors, but the fact remains, that in the 10 years since it became a standard, nobody really cares. Even browsers that support it officially only support subsets of it. The pragmatic reality is that it's a standard only in name, not in fact. If you want something with a clean, complete, consistent documentation describing a real, working, complete, multi-platform implementation, then what you call " proprietary" solutions are actually the way to go. Read the actual license terms for them and you'll see there's actually NOTHING that they prevent you to do, that you'll likely to have any interest in doing.
Why "don't you get much choice about using an IDE" on Windows ?
There's nothing you can do on Unix-style boxes that you cannot do on Windows.
Just download the Windows SDK for free from the Microsoft Download website, it comes with the command line VC++ compiler, and then install VIM or EMACS and ther you go, you can feel right at home.
That since most of the cost resides in doing something useful with the data (completely producing the images), the time and talent of the people that are _in_ the suits, etc, the producers really don't give a frak that their motion capture system costs $1000, $15000 or even $100000. What they want is something that is proved to work, that technicians are familiar with, and that you can readily rent by the hour along with the facility it's located in. So thank you Media Lab for another useless gadget.
Word uses a paragraph composing algorithm that is at least as sophisticated as TeX's. Actually, Knuth's published papers ARE the basis of it. It's otherwise much more sophisticated in its supports of bidirectional, vertical and mixed vertical/horizontal text layouts, and even more so in table composition and mixing text with graphics.
The problem with TeX and LaTeX, beyond the fact that it they have never got a frontend that would put them within grasp of non-technical users, is that actually their typographical references are pretty old themselves and date back to an era dominated by the printed book. Even shoeing it in the constraints of the periodic scientific publications with its multi-column layouts and other constraints has, back in the days around 1990, involved significant overhead development and hacking of the platform. With the new dominance of on-screen reading, dynamic composition, rendering as slides, hyperlinking, mixing with graphics, it's getting less and less competitive.
This only applies to existing air defense systems. There's around two dozen nations who have the capability to develop a specific weapon against such a blimp on a relatively short notice, and not all of them are US allies.
Slapping together a few existing gadgets into an application that is in dire need of a real problem to solve.
Government regulation is like poison. Most of the time you're better off without taking any and then you find yourself in circumstances where it's actually better for you to take some and you call it chemo.
Slip in a paper share of MSFT in the time capsule with a note : can you imagine that in OUR time, people would pay seventeen BUCKS for that !!?
Here's how it goes when I shop:
Me : type "IDE to SATA power adapter"
Me : click on "price : low to high"
Me : click on "Add to Cart"
Me : click on "Checkout"
Me : click on "Use registered credit card xxxx-xxxx1234"
Me : click on "Use registered address"
Me : click on "confirm purchase"
And that is so complicated only because certain people have patented certain things.
(Don't ask me which planning genius decided we needed that level of saturation, but at least there were advantages for the consumer.)
Actually retailers like being clustered with the competition. This produces positive co-stimulation of traffic, it's a completely standard practice.
I think that it's from Vista on that users are steered away, maybe even prevented, from doing that in a client OS. Vista's not so bad, believe me.
That's one of the main reason I didn't switch. The zoom implementation was useless, and I always use zoom to fill my widescreen monitor.
Unfortunately I also don't like very much the "single address and search box" concept, but maybe I can get used to that after all so I guess I'm going to give it another try.
A Discipline of Programming by E.W. Dijkstra (1975)
I found this this morning in my Windows Updater log :
"
Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista (KB960714)
Installation date: 12/18/2008 3:01 AM
"
Yes functional languages are very much at odds with many things, that's why their acceptance is limited, despite many obvious advantages, which revolve the fact that's it's extremely difficult to write bugs with them. On the other hands they are well suited to other domains, such as compilers, document processing (XSLT for example), and all sorts of data processing, i.e. in the financial engineering sector.
Their shortcomings are addressed in different ways : introducing state in them and transforming them into hybrid languages, for example. This bastardization process is exemplified by Microsoft's F# project.
On the other hands, languages like Haskell try to deal with state in a clean, more theoretical, by incorporating side effects into the typing system.
I agree about Darth Vader vs a Rodeo clown. By the way, who would win a fight ?
+1 for that.
I love functional programming but let's face it, computers are state machines and you cannot really program them without understanding how programs modify their state. Hoare. Dijkstra. Read them. Embrace them. Feel the pain of bending your mind around them.