This isn't science, that much is certain. An irreproducible result is noise. Not only is Graham not releasing his code or data set, he's not providing enough information to reproduce the algorithms precisely enough to evaluate their performance on independently gathered data.
I'll fill in between the lines for you: The beaurocrats and politicians were hemming-and-hawing, covering their butts, and milking the lobbyists for every last drop of bribery. Finally, someone who cared about good policy and the good of the people who should be served by the agencies of the government, and cut through the crap.
The function of debate is, often as not, to cloud and confuse the issues, so that an inconvenient truth doesn't cost you at the bottom line. That's where the concept of "FUD" came from.
Agile methods address this problem by keeping development cycles very short. They also tend to foster short-term thinking, but if you can avoid that trap, and keep your team members as loosely coupled as possible, schedule-wise, without losing effective communication and coordination, having frequent (like 2 week) release cycles will flatten out those humps and raise the mean productivity significantly. So says my personal experience. Pundits may differ.
Zionism is racism. Israel is conducting a program of ethnic cleansing. Zionism has motivated a series of wars of aggression, the gradual genocide of the palestinians, the repression of Christianity and Islam, the construction of the world's third largest nuclear arsenal, thousands of brutal murders, the theft of thousands of homes and businesses, military attacks on the U.S., the conversion of 1.5 trillion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds to the Israeli state. That's just recent history. Reach back to the days of the Irgun, and there's horrific terrorism, complicity in the genocide of the Romanian jews, and who knows *what* that I've never even heard of.
Iraq holds 12% of the territory of Herzl's greater Israel, which extends from the Nile to the Euphrates, to Turkey in the north and deep into the Arabian peninsula.
Iraq is Israel's #2 enemy (according to my accounting, in which Israel is #1, but certainly Iraq is #1 in the IDF's accounting). They hit Israel with Scuds in the Gulf War, Montressor. Israel assassinated Bull because he was building a long gun in Iraq which could target Israeli territory. More recently, Iraq hosted Abu Nidal's retirement. The Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld axis of evil is slavishly devoted to Israeli interests at the expense of even American interests, let alone Iraqi, and GWB's conservative evangelical ideology is putty in their hands. They write Israel a blank check against the U.S. bank account, without any attempt to restrain it's brutality and expansionism. That, my friend, is Zionism of the most virulently malign variety.
A troll is not someone who disagrees with you. A troll is someone who posts material which is not pertinent or rational for the purpose of inciting flames. My material is rational and pertinent to the article that I was responding to. I have no desire to incite flames, but rather to incite reflection upon the reality of unpopular truths.
There are three fundamentally good reasons to design a new programming language:
(1) A new model of computation or machine. Lisp, Prolog, Algol, Forth, SNOBOL, ML, BLISS-32, APL, SETL, Parallation Lisp, Smalltalk, Self are examples.
(2) A new kind of progamming methodology or application domain. Bourne/Korn shell, Perl, C++, Eiffel, Sather, Logo, PHP are examples.
(3) Incremental improvement derived from practical experience. Java, C#, Kylix/Delphi, Visual Basic, Haskell, D are examples.
Each of these can make serious contributions to the state of the art. The innovations of the first type are more fundamental, more profound, but also more academic in nature, and take some time to provide practical improvements in the art of practice. Those of the second and third kind can provide more immediate and accessible improvements in reliability, productivity, and feasibility of practical development.
Yes, there is a tendency to create vanity languages. If D ever was that, it has progressed far beyond, if a half-hour's reading has not deceived me regarding it's design. Whether it's implementation has or will ever have progressed to the point where it can fulfill its potential as an innovation of the third kind... I just don't know.
When the functionalities in question are basic functions of any utile development environment, I have to disagree. Java is enormously simplified by integrating thread handling and synchronization into the language itself. Would you rather write regex code in Perl or in C? Associative arrays, likewise. I think the choices made were good ones, in this regard.
It's just a provocation strategy. They're trying desperately to get the Baath government to do *something* that can be used as a pretext for a massive bombing campaign and ground invasion.
If UNMOVIC were to take interviewees to Cyprus and then not return them to Iraq, it would be seen for what it is, a U.S. spy agency, and Hussein might conceivably (yeah, right -- he's not *that* stupid) slow down his cooperation, which to this point has been obsequiously total, and thereby provide the required pretext.
All of this is driven by the Zionist/Oil faction now in control of U.S. foreign policy: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle. I think that they are likely to fail in their efforts this time, though. If I didn't believe that, I'd be morally obligated to send them to their judgement, so I'll stick to that view as long as I can.
While Christ is generally portrayed with nordic features in nordic cultures, he is also generally portrayed with asian features in asian cultures, and african features in african cultures as well, quite appropriately to the universality of his role. After all, the entire point of incarnation is identification with individual humans. Any barrier to identification is profoundly counter- productive to his purpose.
Many responders observe that the 600 mW of a phone is about 1e-3 or less of the power of an oven, but neglect to consider that you don't hold an oven against your skull (hopefully). Holding a cell at 600mW 5mm from your skull is like holding an oven magnetron 6 inches from your skull, in terms of the power density over the surface area at the nearest point. I don't do either. I use a headset.
My repetoire is similar to yours, but I can't consider my skills current in any but the 5 or 6 languages that I've been using in the past couple of years, whatever they happen to be at the time.
While the ability to recognize when a certain model or paradigm is appropriate is very useful, it's almost never right to use the corresponding language, for several reasons. Among these are:
- Maintainability. You might be happy to use
Prolog, Haskell, C++ and Java in a single app,
but pity the manager who has to hire your
replacement.
- Evironment. No matter how well an Apache app
could exploit generators and co-routines, I'm not
going to be writing it in Icon. Nor will I be
writing thin client interfaces in Common Lisp.
In almost every real world situation, the practical aspects of engineering process and business requirements will preclude using the Right Tool For The Job.
Java, C++, Perl, JavaScript and Visual Basic are the ones with market. COBOL and Fortran jobs are few and far between. SQL is an adjunct, a query language, not a programming language, and should be familiar to every Java, C++, Perl and Visual Basic programmer.
This is an illustration of the hazards of using commercial software. An enterprise operating exclusively on open-source software would be effectively immune to such intimadations.
Re:Two way is feasible
on
802.11 RF Amp
·
· Score: 2
Given that my NAT box is a laptop, rather than spending $100 on a WAP, I just used a PCMCIA card with an antenna, so, yeah, in this case, one is wireless -- although only the p2p services running on my actual, physiological, lap are being served through a wireless link.
To decimate means to kill every tenth person. In South Africa, roughly 25% of the population has HIV. Barring a (cheap) cure, that's likely to result in substantially more than decimation.
You've got to love those Romans. They're the only people in history who actually needed a special word to refer to the process of killing every tenth person.
I know little about molecular biology, but I also seem to recall that some proportion of the base pairs are essentially a form of ECC.
Any professionals or more competent amateurs care to comment?
Re:Two way is feasible
on
802.11 RF Amp
·
· Score: 2
> I don't see anyone running servers off of laptops > accross a network.
Funny... I do just that. I have a lot of old laps that aren't really usable as interface machines anymore, but have cardbus 100tx nics, and use a lot less power and run a lot quieter than some midi-tower would, so i have them in my closet doing nat, serving web pages, serving mail, etc.
In a professional environment, they'd be replaced with rackmount systems, but as a good way to be green, recycle the hardware, and factor my infrastructure for maintainability, old laps as servers makes a lot of good sense.
I thought a Treo would be cat's pajamas, but when I got it I realized that I was unconsciously depending on tactile feedback to dial in a suprising number of situations, driving, etc... I gave it away and got a P800 instead.
Phones need keypads.
What is this WinCE crap? The thought of BSODs on my phone does not amuse me.
You can get almost all of that bandwidth in a phone call. "Tele"-commuting means "tele"-communications. Whiteboarding is good too.
If someone is not producing good documentation, they are a long-term drain on the organization and should be dumped. Just a rule of thumb, of course, but an important one.
I've been telecommuting for 14 years, and with the exception of my stint at Sun Microsystems, I found it a much superior arrangement. It works best when everyone is telecommuting. I can't understand how anyone can do useful work in a cube. It takes me 30 minutes to get started on a substantial piece of code, old or new, and if my train of thought is interrupted during that time, I have to restart the clock.
In a 100% telecommuting environment, the result is superior documentation, superior process and coordination, and superior individual productivity. Of course you have to cull the dead weight much more quickly, but it also becomes very obvious much more quickly who is contributing and who is not.
Making systems boot up and login non-interactively is hardly "removing security". How do you see that doing so would materially change the practical security of your organization's data? Systems are almost always logged in anyhow. That's why nobody can remember their password. (You might get the same sort of savings with a material increase in "security" by enforcing password-protected screensavers everywhere, because then the passwords would always be in mind.)
"Security" is mostly a waste of time and money, and only has value when it defends against an actual breach. It is wise economic planning to marshall your resources to address the cases with favorable cost/benefit. Surely you don't mean to argue that the decision is erroneous if it results in a net savings? If you do, then "security" is a religion for you, not a tool.
All too often, security means you can't do your job. The $20 for the support call is just the tip of the iceberg. It's the 2 hours that a meeting to close a $500,000 deal gets delayed, or the hour that two $300/hr consultants cool their heels while Mr. PHB deals with support that are the real costs here.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't science, that much is certain.
An irreproducible result is noise. Not
only is Graham not releasing his code or
data set, he's not providing enough information
to reproduce the algorithms precisely enough
to evaluate their performance on independently
gathered data.
In short, this is marketing, not research.
I'll fill in between the lines for you: The beaurocrats and
politicians were hemming-and-hawing, covering their butts, and
milking the lobbyists for every last drop of bribery. Finally,
someone who cared about good policy and the good of the people
who should be served by the agencies of the government, and
cut through the crap.
The function of debate is, often as not, to cloud and confuse
the issues, so that an inconvenient truth doesn't cost you
at the bottom line. That's where the concept of "FUD" came
from.
I suspect you've never done government work.
What is a UFO nut?
Agile methods address this problem by keeping development
cycles very short. They also tend to foster short-term
thinking, but if you can avoid that trap, and keep your
team members as loosely coupled as possible, schedule-wise,
without losing effective communication and coordination,
having frequent (like 2 week) release cycles will flatten
out those humps and raise the mean productivity significantly.
So says my personal experience. Pundits may differ.
Zionism is racism. Israel is conducting a program of
ethnic cleansing. Zionism has motivated a series of
wars of aggression, the gradual genocide of the palestinians,
the repression of Christianity and Islam, the construction
of the world's third largest nuclear arsenal, thousands of
brutal murders, the theft of thousands of homes and businesses,
military attacks on the U.S., the conversion of 1.5 trillion
dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds to the Israeli state. That's
just recent history. Reach back to the days of the Irgun,
and there's horrific terrorism, complicity in the genocide of
the Romanian jews, and who knows *what* that I've never even
heard of.
Iraq holds 12% of the territory of Herzl's greater Israel,
which extends from the Nile to the Euphrates, to Turkey
in the north and deep into the Arabian peninsula.
Iraq is Israel's #2 enemy (according to my accounting, in
which Israel is #1, but certainly Iraq is #1 in the IDF's
accounting). They hit Israel with Scuds in the Gulf War,
Montressor. Israel assassinated Bull because he was building
a long gun in Iraq which could target Israeli territory.
More recently, Iraq hosted Abu Nidal's retirement.
The Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld axis of evil is slavishly
devoted to Israeli interests at the expense of even American
interests, let alone Iraqi, and GWB's conservative evangelical
ideology is putty in their hands. They write Israel a
blank check against the U.S. bank account, without any
attempt to restrain it's brutality and expansionism. That,
my friend, is Zionism of the most virulently malign variety.
A troll is not someone who disagrees with you. A troll is
someone who posts material which is not pertinent or rational
for the purpose of inciting flames. My material is rational
and pertinent to the article that I was responding to.
I have no desire to incite flames, but rather to incite
reflection upon the reality of unpopular truths.
There are three fundamentally good reasons to design
a new programming language:
(1) A new model of computation or machine. Lisp,
Prolog, Algol, Forth, SNOBOL, ML, BLISS-32,
APL, SETL, Parallation Lisp, Smalltalk, Self
are examples.
(2) A new kind of progamming methodology or
application domain. Bourne/Korn shell, Perl,
C++, Eiffel, Sather, Logo, PHP are examples.
(3) Incremental improvement derived from
practical experience. Java, C#, Kylix/Delphi,
Visual Basic, Haskell, D are examples.
Each of these can make serious contributions to
the state of the art. The innovations of the
first type are more fundamental, more profound,
but also more academic in nature, and take some
time to provide practical improvements in the
art of practice. Those of the second and third
kind can provide more immediate and accessible
improvements in reliability, productivity, and
feasibility of practical development.
Yes, there is a tendency to create vanity
languages. If D ever was that, it has progressed
far beyond, if a half-hour's reading has not
deceived me regarding it's design. Whether it's
implementation has or will ever have progressed
to the point where it can fulfill its potential
as an innovation of the third kind... I just don't
know.
D has usable associative arrays and regex built in.
D is capable of running fast. D doesn't weld
two alien syntagma into one rough beast.
When the functionalities in question are basic
functions of any utile development environment,
I have to disagree. Java is enormously simplified
by integrating thread handling and synchronization
into the language itself. Would you rather
write regex code in Perl or in C? Associative
arrays, likewise. I think the choices made were
good ones, in this regard.
It's just a provocation strategy. They're trying
desperately to get the Baath government to do
*something* that can be used as a pretext for a
massive bombing campaign and ground invasion.
If UNMOVIC were to take interviewees to Cyprus
and then not return them to Iraq, it would be
seen for what it is, a U.S. spy agency, and
Hussein might conceivably (yeah, right -- he's
not *that* stupid) slow down his cooperation,
which to this point has been obsequiously
total, and thereby provide the required pretext.
All of this is driven by the Zionist/Oil faction
now in control of U.S. foreign policy: Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle. I think that they
are likely to fail in their efforts this time,
though. If I didn't believe that, I'd be morally
obligated to send them to their judgement, so I'll
stick to that view as long as I can.
While Christ is generally portrayed with nordic
features in nordic cultures, he is also generally
portrayed with asian features in asian cultures,
and african features in african cultures as well,
quite appropriately to the universality of his
role. After all, the entire point of incarnation
is identification with individual humans. Any
barrier to identification is profoundly counter-
productive to his purpose.
Many responders observe that the 600 mW of a phone
is about 1e-3 or less of the power of an oven, but
neglect to consider that you don't hold an oven
against your skull (hopefully). Holding a cell
at 600mW 5mm from your skull is like holding an
oven magnetron 6 inches from your skull, in terms
of the power density over the surface area at the
nearest point. I don't do either. I use a headset.
My repetoire is similar to yours, but I can't
consider my skills current in any but the 5 or 6
languages that I've been using in the past
couple of years, whatever they happen to be at
the time.
While the ability to recognize
when a certain model or paradigm is appropriate is
very useful, it's almost never right to use the
corresponding language, for several reasons.
Among these are:
- Maintainability. You might be happy to use
Prolog, Haskell, C++ and Java in a single app,
but pity the manager who has to hire your
replacement.
- Evironment. No matter how well an Apache app
could exploit generators and co-routines, I'm not
going to be writing it in Icon. Nor will I be
writing thin client interfaces in Common Lisp.
In almost every real world situation, the practical
aspects of engineering process and business
requirements will preclude using the Right Tool
For The Job.
Java, C++, Perl, JavaScript and Visual Basic
are the ones with market. COBOL and Fortran
jobs are few and far between. SQL is an adjunct,
a query language, not a programming language,
and should be familiar to every Java, C++, Perl
and Visual Basic programmer.
I'm a master pearl programmer with 20 years of
experience.
You may not know it but "pearl" is slang for
"clitoris" in Japan.
There is *no* factual reason to believe that
Iraq is currently taking any material steps
towards the production or deployment of nuclear
weapons.
Please refute me if you can.
This is an illustration of the hazards of using
commercial software. An enterprise operating
exclusively on open-source software would be
effectively immune to such intimadations.
Given that my NAT box is a laptop, rather than
spending $100 on a WAP, I just used a PCMCIA card
with an antenna, so, yeah, in this case, one is
wireless -- although only the p2p services running
on my actual, physiological, lap are being served
through a wireless link.
My small business is an enterprise run out of my
home -- where should I go?
By the way -- anybody know where I can find a
rackmount blade enclosure with 5.1 audio support?
To decimate means to kill every tenth person.
In South Africa, roughly 25% of the population
has HIV. Barring a (cheap) cure, that's likely
to result in substantially more than decimation.
You've got to love those Romans. They're the
only people in history who actually needed a
special word to refer to the process of killing
every tenth person.
I know little about molecular biology, but I also
seem to recall that some proportion of the base
pairs are essentially a form of ECC.
Any professionals or more competent amateurs
care to comment?
> I don't see anyone running servers off of laptops
> accross a network.
Funny... I do just that. I have a lot of old
laps that aren't really usable as interface machines
anymore, but have cardbus 100tx nics, and use a lot
less power and run a lot quieter than some midi-tower
would, so i have them in my closet doing nat, serving
web pages, serving mail, etc.
In a professional environment, they'd be replaced
with rackmount systems, but as a good way to be
green, recycle the hardware, and factor my
infrastructure for maintainability, old laps as
servers makes a lot of good sense.
I'm talking home use here, of course.
I thought a Treo would be cat's pajamas, but when
I got it I realized that I was unconsciously
depending on tactile feedback to dial in a suprising
number of situations, driving, etc... I gave it
away and got a P800 instead.
Phones need keypads.
What is this WinCE crap? The thought of BSODs
on my phone does not amuse me.
You can get almost all of that bandwidth in a phone
call. "Tele"-commuting means "tele"-communications.
Whiteboarding is good too.
If someone is not producing good documentation, they
are a long-term drain on the organization and should
be dumped. Just a rule of thumb, of course, but
an important one.
I've been telecommuting for 14 years, and with the
exception of my stint at Sun Microsystems, I found
it a much superior arrangement. It works best when
everyone is telecommuting. I can't understand how
anyone can do useful work in a cube. It takes me
30 minutes to get started on a substantial piece
of code, old or new, and if my train of thought is
interrupted during that time, I have to restart
the clock.
In a 100% telecommuting environment, the result is
superior documentation, superior process and
coordination, and superior individual productivity.
Of course you have to cull the dead weight much
more quickly, but it also becomes very obvious
much more quickly who is contributing and who is
not.
Making systems boot up and login non-interactively
is hardly "removing security". How do you see
that doing so would materially change the practical
security of your organization's data? Systems
are almost always logged in anyhow. That's why
nobody can remember their password. (You might
get the same sort of savings with a material
increase in "security" by enforcing password-protected
screensavers everywhere, because then the
passwords would always be in mind.)
"Security" is mostly a waste of time and money, and
only has value when it defends against an actual
breach. It is wise economic planning
to marshall your resources to address the cases
with favorable cost/benefit. Surely you don't mean
to argue that the decision is erroneous if it results
in a net savings? If you do, then "security" is a
religion for you, not a tool.
All too often, security means you can't do your job.
The $20 for the support call is just the tip of the
iceberg. It's the 2 hours that a meeting to close
a $500,000 deal gets delayed, or the hour that
two $300/hr consultants cool their heels while
Mr. PHB deals with support that are the real costs
here.