I understand the thing with type vs. untyped programming languages. I now untyped languages have rapid protoyping advantages, but that does not mean you should check EVERYTHING at runtime.
Some things CAN be checked at compile/save time and I want to know BEFORE I run the thing that I misspelled the one name of a routine or method or whatever.
Oh yeah, while I am working with Notes, another thing.
Error messages should tell you WHERE the !"!" error happened as well as What happened. If I have a form with 50 fields an error such as "Number expected" does NOT HELP!!!!! "Number exptected in Field for variable " is a good error message. Just tell me WHERE error was.
Lotus Notes is full of this sort of crap. The weird thing is, the system can pretty much give you a load of help with an error since it has the context available when it happened. For instance, Notes knows pretty damn well in which field is is evaluating the formula when it croaks. Why not just tell me too???
This does not just go for Notes, many systems do this (Xerces XML parse, for instance, does not tell you in which line of your XML file it discovered the problem.
One thing that really pisses me off are programs that always open on some stupid place (usually MY Docsuments or something stupid).
If I open something, and next time I go to a dir, the program should use the same dir as the last time I opened something, or the same dir as the place where the current file is saved. ALways going to My Documents or god know what is stupid, and very annoying. The Initial Directory of File/Open should track the current open file's location.
Look at it this way. If you switch on a soldering iron or some cooking plates, it starts getting warmer and warmet and warmer. After a while it starts to glow dull red, and if you really jack it up to the max it might become bright red. This happens at fairly high temperatures (ie, 400 degrees centigrade or so). If you make it much htter it will begin to glow white because it start glowing into the green and blue parts of the spectrum, which combines to become white. In other words, for a thing to transmit heat into the visible wavelengths and those just below visible.
Now, cheap IR devices and IR film in a camera will reach into the IR but not far down. They will easily detect things that are pretty hot but which have not started to glow yet. If you want to watch coolish things (computers) you need something that can see the far infrared, and this is going to cost you lots of moolah. Like another post mentioned, it needs to be cooled (the Sidewinder uses liquid Nitrogen). Also, because the wavelength is very long, the pictures are quite blurry.
Of course, if you have an Athlon and take off the fan, you might just get it to radiate enough blackbody radiation to be detected on a cheapo IR sensor since it will reach temperatures not too far from the point where it will begin to glow. For a few seconds at least...
Btw, IR films in a camera are neat mostly because just below the visible part of the spectrum plants are pretty reflective, and therefore IR pics in nature look spooky. And you need a filter on them which filters out anything visible. These filters are practically black.
On another aside, some flowers have beautiful patterns in the near UV, just beyond the blue you can see. Insects CAN see that. Your retina is sensitive beyond the normal blue, but the lens absorbs it. People with a lens replacement (my father for instance) can see further into the blue spectrum. These slight-UV thingies which are used to make the flourescent marks in banknotes glow? My dad can see a blue light shining around the device, which you and I cannot.
Lemme get this straight. You are running a NUCLEAR REACTOR with a unsupported computer and replaced it with another unsupported computer thats older than me??!! What the hell happens when the PDP croaks? "Screw the monitoring, we don't need that anyways".
Thats about what happened at Chernobyl, you know. They switched off the safety because it was interfering with what they were doing.
I am beginning to think that maybe Greenpeace has a point.
I could not mail you directly, because I cannot get your address from your user profile. I have family in Cape Town. If you are in Capetown in December, gimme a mail and I could arrange for someone to help you send whatever you could find to Pretoria. This would not be a problem at all.
My email is netgrok@yahoo.de
Unfortunately, I am in Europe at the moment so I cannot be of direct assitance.
On another note, is it possible to run two instances of X on the same machine with 2 videocards? I would like to use a USB keyboard/mouse on one screen and the normal PS2/ stuff on the other. And I particularly want to run 2 instances of xdm/gsm/kdm/your-favourite-dm.
The reason is that my GF sometimes wants to read her mail while I am working and this cannot possibly be such a CPU drain (I have a GB of RAM, after all).
The main problem with the ad-sponsored system is that ads are meant to be seen. With eyes.
If someone now tries to place a non-HTML site on the web, which is mostly to be read by a machine, this is difficult, since machines do have emotional responses to ads, unlike humans.
Lets take an example. LEts say I have a site with a great newsfeed on some topic. I want to put out the newsfeed in XML, so people can go and format it anyway they want. Now they don't see the ads anymore. No more sponsorship.
This is actually a serious issue, since XML has been touted as a good way of distributing content with much more semantic meaning. If more sites publish it, search engies will becmoe better. Classification. Indexing. Querying. Understanding. However, meta information simply cannot use a sponsorship system which is based on the idea of a patternof pixels throwing an actuall pattern of pixels on someone's retina and triggering a neural response. For that, we MUST decouple web content from such a simple-minded revenue system. Only in such a way will the web be opened to its true potential.
Of course,one can talk about thing such as using Ads to sponsor a pre-formatted HTML view and using Micropayments to access semantically much richer data in XML. Or Tex, or whatever.
Imagine paying for the meta-information on a site such as IMDB, Stratfor, CNN, Encyclopedia Brittanica or, for that matter, Slashdot and formatting and searching the goods on your own machine with much more powerful tools. This is what XML is about. And ads are hampering it.
If micropayments are the answer, I dunno. But ads aint.
Wordstart is great. Borland and Turbo PAscal havebeen using those keys for zillions of years, and it is still the default in Joe. Joe is still the editor I use, and I use it because I knew the keys from Borland. Even now I refuse to help my assistants when they did not install joe on any of our Linux machines. I REFUSE to work with V-bloody-I.
In fact, I wrote a spreadsheet which used Wordstar commands to do as a project 10 years ago. Ran on DOS. Will have to dig it up, port is to Linux and post it somewhere.
Re: So are undecidable algorithms
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, some undecidable algorithms are also useful in practice. Hindley Milner Type inference is not decidable, and is used in every functional language out there.
It only diverges for incorrect programs, for for any correct program you will get a result. Also, it only diverges for a small set of contrived things, so common type errors are a non-issue. For correct problems, it occasionaly gives exponential time, butm again, you have to write a weird (ie. nothing that would occur in practice) example to do that.
Most program analyses inside compilers are undecidable, although there some approximation is usually used.
If you look at it in one way, even the Halting problem is usable: You simply run the program and you can see after a few minutes if it hangs or not.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am ranting...
I understand the thing with type vs. untyped programming languages. I now untyped languages have rapid protoyping advantages, but that does not mean you should check EVERYTHING at runtime.
Some things CAN be checked at compile/save time and I want to know BEFORE I run the thing that I misspelled the one name of a routine or method or whatever.
Oh yeah, while I am working with Notes, another thing.
Error messages should tell you WHERE the !"!" error happened as well as What happened. If I have a form with 50 fields an error such as "Number expected" does NOT HELP!!!!! "Number exptected in Field for variable " is a good error message. Just tell me WHERE error was.
Lotus Notes is full of this sort of crap. The weird thing is, the system can pretty much give you a load of help with an error since it has the context available when it happened. For instance, Notes knows pretty damn well in which field is is evaluating the formula when it croaks. Why not just tell me too???
This does not just go for Notes, many systems do this (Xerces XML parse, for instance, does not tell you in which line of your XML file it discovered the problem.
One thing that really pisses me off are programs that always open on some stupid place (usually MY Docsuments or something stupid).
If I open something, and next time I go to a dir, the program should use the same dir as the last time I opened something, or the same dir as the place where the current file is saved. ALways going to My Documents or god know what is stupid, and very annoying. The Initial Directory of File/Open should track the current open file's location.
Look at it this way. If you switch on a soldering iron or some cooking plates, it starts getting warmer and warmet and warmer. After a while it starts to glow dull red, and if you really jack it up to the max it might become bright red. This happens at fairly high temperatures (ie, 400 degrees centigrade or so). If you make it much htter it will begin to glow white because it start glowing into the green and blue parts of the spectrum, which combines to become white. In other words, for a thing to transmit heat into the visible wavelengths and those just below visible.
Now, cheap IR devices and IR film in a camera will reach into the IR but not far down. They will easily detect things that are pretty hot but which have not started to glow yet. If you want to watch coolish things (computers) you need something that can see the far infrared, and this is going to cost you lots of moolah. Like another post mentioned, it needs to be cooled (the Sidewinder uses liquid Nitrogen). Also, because the wavelength is very long, the pictures are quite blurry.
Of course, if you have an Athlon and take off the fan, you might just get it to radiate enough blackbody radiation to be detected on a cheapo IR sensor since it will reach temperatures not too far from the point where it will begin to glow. For a few seconds at least...
Btw, IR films in a camera are neat mostly because just below the visible part of the spectrum plants are pretty reflective, and therefore IR pics in nature look spooky. And you need a filter on them which filters out anything visible. These filters are practically black.
On another aside, some flowers have beautiful patterns in the near UV, just beyond the blue you can see. Insects CAN see that. Your retina is sensitive beyond the normal blue, but the lens absorbs it. People with a lens replacement (my father for instance) can see further into the blue spectrum. These slight-UV thingies which are used to make the flourescent marks in banknotes glow? My dad can see a blue light shining around the device, which you and I cannot.
Lemme get this straight. You are running a NUCLEAR REACTOR with a unsupported computer and replaced it with another unsupported computer thats older than me??!! What the hell happens when the PDP croaks? "Screw the monitoring, we don't need that anyways".
Thats about what happened at Chernobyl, you know. They switched off the safety because it was interfering with what they were doing.
I am beginning to think that maybe Greenpeace has a point.
TS
Hi,
I could not mail you directly, because I cannot get your address from your user profile. I have family in Cape Town. If you are in Capetown in December, gimme a mail and I could arrange for someone to help you send whatever you could find to Pretoria. This would not be a problem at all.
My email is netgrok@yahoo.de
Unfortunately, I am in Europe at the moment so I cannot be of direct assitance.
L
On another note, is it possible to run two instances of X on the same machine with 2 videocards? I would like to use a USB keyboard/mouse on one screen and the normal PS2/ stuff on the other. And I particularly want to run 2 instances of xdm/gsm/kdm/your-favourite-dm.
The reason is that my GF sometimes wants to read her mail while I am working and this cannot possibly be such a CPU drain (I have a GB of RAM, after all).
Any ideas?
L
The main problem with the ad-sponsored system is that ads are meant to be seen. With eyes. If someone now tries to place a non-HTML site on the web, which is mostly to be read by a machine, this is difficult, since machines do have emotional responses to ads, unlike humans. Lets take an example. LEts say I have a site with a great newsfeed on some topic. I want to put out the newsfeed in XML, so people can go and format it anyway they want. Now they don't see the ads anymore. No more sponsorship. This is actually a serious issue, since XML has been touted as a good way of distributing content with much more semantic meaning. If more sites publish it, search engies will becmoe better. Classification. Indexing. Querying. Understanding. However, meta information simply cannot use a sponsorship system which is based on the idea of a patternof pixels throwing an actuall pattern of pixels on someone's retina and triggering a neural response. For that, we MUST decouple web content from such a simple-minded revenue system. Only in such a way will the web be opened to its true potential. Of course,one can talk about thing such as using Ads to sponsor a pre-formatted HTML view and using Micropayments to access semantically much richer data in XML. Or Tex, or whatever. Imagine paying for the meta-information on a site such as IMDB, Stratfor, CNN, Encyclopedia Brittanica or, for that matter, Slashdot and formatting and searching the goods on your own machine with much more powerful tools. This is what XML is about. And ads are hampering it. If micropayments are the answer, I dunno. But ads aint.
Wordstart is great. Borland and Turbo PAscal havebeen using those keys for zillions of years, and it is still the default in Joe. Joe is still the editor I use, and I use it because I knew the keys from Borland. Even now I refuse to help my assistants when they did not install joe on any of our Linux machines. I REFUSE to work with V-bloody-I. In fact, I wrote a spreadsheet which used Wordstar commands to do as a project 10 years ago. Ran on DOS. Will have to dig it up, port is to Linux and post it somewhere.
Actually, some undecidable algorithms are also useful in practice. Hindley Milner Type inference is not decidable, and is used in every functional language out there. It only diverges for incorrect programs, for for any correct program you will get a result. Also, it only diverges for a small set of contrived things, so common type errors are a non-issue. For correct problems, it occasionaly gives exponential time, butm again, you have to write a weird (ie. nothing that would occur in practice) example to do that. Most program analyses inside compilers are undecidable, although there some approximation is usually used. If you look at it in one way, even the Halting problem is usable: You simply run the program and you can see after a few minutes if it hangs or not.