I'm not sure that was first. There was a story in Astounding in the early 1950's that had that theme. I can't remember the title, but it was in the issue with the cover that had an extremely tall and thing person standing next to an extremely short and broad person each holding up a set of clothes for someone of intermediate size. I believe the tag was something like "One size fits all".
And there may have been a Cordwainer Smith story about that, but I can't quite pull it out of my memory.
Well, if you're talking about this particular device...I've no idea what it would be useful for, or why they picked a USB stick form-factor. If you're comparing Google's Go machine to something that classifies cat pictures, I don't think you understand the problem...or what the problem that was being solved is. Or if you're being dismissive of Go (i.e., "I don't like Go, therefore playing it isn't intelligent."), then perhaps you don't understand what was being done or why.
I'm trying to read your comment as being more insightful, and failing. If you're feeling threatened, this is a valid feeling, but denial isn't a useful response. OTOH, there's probably several years before programmers jobs are threatened. I would no longer say several decades.
Mobile phones made "dumb" watches obsolete despite being a bit more inconvenience when you want to know the time
I really wish the market didn't seem to agree with you. It's another case where my taste doesn't at all match the market. I'd rather like to buy a portable CD player or MP3 player, but the things I've seen on the shelves labeled MP3 players want to attach to your computer, and don't seem to have any provision for either a usb stick or a CD...so I assume that this means you need them plugged in while you're using them. Of course, you could use a smart-phone and some blue-tooth ear-buds...
I haven't tried to buy a watch in a couple of years, but the last time I looked I couldn't find any that weren't either expensive jewelry or unusable. This causes me to expect that in not too long I may be needing to rely on my phone for the time, but it won't be by preference.
You should read the Go masters commentary on the recent match. These "AI" thingies can come up with original ideas and implement them. And their original ideas can be better than those of any human expert. (They aren't always, of course.)
What all current AIs I've heard of are weak on is layered hierarchies of goals.
My thought was that it's a sign that solar panels have gotten a lot cheaper. If they're cheap enough it might be a good idea...though not for every purpose. (I mean the floating solar generator plant, not the desalinization idea. I haven't thought that one through. It seems like a floating desalinization plant shouldn't use that much power, since it would probably be based on solar evaporation.)
Well, you've excluded all web purchases I've ever seen. This may not be unreasonable, given the "contracts" and EULAs that are usually offered, but do realize what you're saying.
And have you gone to an Emergency Room recently? And been in NEED of urgent care?
I think your position is unreasonable. And I think most of the contracts I've seen offered to individuals by corporations should be declared unenforceable contracts of adhesion. That they aren't tells you who has power.
No. libertarians don't support deceptive business practices. Libertarians do support deceptive business practices in that they are opposed to all means possible for impeding them. (And while libertarians [lower case "l"] don't support deceptive business practices, they are incoherent about how they should be stopped.)
To say that you are opposed to something while at the same time being explicitly against all possible means of opposing it gives the lie to your original claim...or shows that you are incoherent.
You shouldn't. They are vaguely trustworthy for different things.
The amount you can trust a powerful person (without knowing the personal history) depends upon how much they will suffer from abusing your trust.
The "personal history" thing is because some people (most people actually, but not most people who become powerful) are well meaning and generally honest. If you can determine that the specific powerful person you are considering trusting is such a person, then it's reasonable to trust them a lot more. But this doesn't mean that you should trust their successors in power...and powerful people frequently change positions.
Odd comment. Based on prior stories I have included PayPal as one of the scam companies.
A better answer, though one that's bothersome, is to have a special limited credit card, and use that for web purchases. Many drugstores sell them, and probably many other places do too. But doing it that way is a bother. I've opted for a less secure way...I use two separate banks. One to store money, and one the handle transactions. The credit cards are linked to the one that only hold a small amount of cash at a time, and where I periodically refill the accounts. So you can choose your degree of security by deciding how much cash to hold in your transaction accounts.
When systemd is in use, installing on one partition makes the other partitions unbootable...unless they can be booted with SysV. This has been known for over a year, and, IIUC, has been marked "won't fix".
So I find systemd to be unusable. I like to test new systems without rendering my current system unusable.
To me this is clearly a fault system software fault. And that puts it clearly as Microsoft's fault.
You can call it a configuration issue if you want to, but the change in the configuration was made by a Microsoft patch, so it's still Microsoft's fault.
Or, I suppose you could say that the mistake was in applying a Microsoft approved update. But then you need to take some other approach to ensuring that your computer didn't get 0wn3d, and given the job that this computer had isolation from the internet isn't a viable solution.
It's a configuration issue, but most window managers will inform you occasionally (as settable intervals) if updates are available, or security updates. Still, the messages can be ignored if you're busy.
No, but it means that I don't believe their assertions, because they lie so often. And so I *expect* this is actually about encryption no matter what kind of story they fob off as a justifier. I don't *know* that that's true, but all I have to say that it's about something else is their word, and they lie more often than they tell the truth.
Well, I looked at your answer, and... Yeah, that would work, but UGH!! That's horribly ugly. And slow. I don't want to be needing to even convert numbers to strings and back, much less all that other garbage. That is literally a WORSE approach than re-writing in C++. Or even Vala. (OK, Vala may not work. The documentation is so terrible that I can't tell the syntax for many language features. And it *still* might be a better option.)
I think every successful programmer is probably an example of applying this advice. I've never met a successful programmer that hated programming, and most people hate programming. But the field has gotten more crowded, so perhaps many people are now doing it purely for the money.
FWIW, modern Fortran is an excellent language that doesn't get enough respect. But that isn't enough to make me use it. Partially because, since it doesn't get enough respect, most libraries that I would need are foreign function calls.
Yeah, but last I checked pypy only handled python2, not python3. (They were either working on it, or planning to work on it, I don't remember which.)
Unfortunately, what I need isn't exactly speed, but binary mapping of structs (no pointers allowed) to disk blocks. So python is out. The GIL would make using it a headache anyway. (Again, not speed exactly, but simultaneous execution of different threads. Processes could be made to do in a pinch, so I could use multi-processing, but it would be a headache. ZMQ & C++ looks easier, even with the headaches that causes when handling unicode.)
Yes, but it would have been extremely useful if the new version of the language had a way to invoke the old version of the language built-in. Forwards compatibility is impossible, but backwards compatibility isn't. (Yes, that's a bit more extreme than backwards compatibility usually means, but then so is the change.)
What I'm asking for isn't quite impossible. I'm asking for the new version to allow separate "compilation" in the old language, but to the new binary format. Python, after all, *IS* a compiler, it just compiles to a virtual machine that runs the code.
That's a *VERY* interesting assertion. There are a couple of Python2 libraries that I'd like to call from Python3, and there's some code that would be easier to write in Python2 than in Python3...so how do you do it? Even better, got any good links?
Well, that makes sense, and explains the attention that numPy gets (also Cython), but I have a hard time believing that it's THAT large a percentage of the developer community.
My guess is that it's largely age related, which some large effect coming from "leading from the top". Guido is rather easy-going, and he doesn't encourage others to be harsh or abrupt.
I pretty much agree, but the other guy's point about threading is spot on. Python doesn't have concurrent execution of threads, but only of processes. This can lead to some fierce work-arounds and hard problems. Multi-processing requires multiple python interpreters to be loaded (one/process). Etc. So does any other approach to concurrent execution. (ZMQ comes to mind, but I generally don't use that to start another python process, except while in the process of rewriting something into a different language so that I *don't* need to start up another python process.)
Still, that's a huge number of lines of code, and I don't see the reason. But, of course, I haven't studied the problem.
When you say "Freeloaders" do you mean the ISPs? They took government money to provide fast service, and then didn't build out, so that seems a charitable term to use for them.
Heinlein's Methuselah's Children had that as a sub-plot element. It's a bit dated, but pretty good. Long term effects are discussed in the sequel "Time Enough for Love", but that needed a better editor.
Probably, but I doubt that that will be her problem. Teleomere shortening is one of the body's defenses against cancer...and she's apparently turned that off. There may also be a similar reason for stem cell depletion, though I've never heard of one for certain, only a couple of things that suggest that stem cells are more likely to turn cancerous than other cells. And the word is suggest, as there are other findings that suggest that senescent cells are the ones most likely to turn cancerous.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that was first. There was a story in Astounding in the early 1950's that had that theme. I can't remember the title, but it was in the issue with the cover that had an extremely tall and thing person standing next to an extremely short and broad person each holding up a set of clothes for someone of intermediate size. I believe the tag was something like "One size fits all".
And there may have been a Cordwainer Smith story about that, but I can't quite pull it out of my memory.
Well, if you're talking about this particular device...I've no idea what it would be useful for, or why they picked a USB stick form-factor. If you're comparing Google's Go machine to something that classifies cat pictures, I don't think you understand the problem...or what the problem that was being solved is. Or if you're being dismissive of Go (i.e., "I don't like Go, therefore playing it isn't intelligent."), then perhaps you don't understand what was being done or why.
I'm trying to read your comment as being more insightful, and failing. If you're feeling threatened, this is a valid feeling, but denial isn't a useful response. OTOH, there's probably several years before programmers jobs are threatened. I would no longer say several decades.
Mobile phones made "dumb" watches obsolete despite being a bit more inconvenience when you want to know the time
I really wish the market didn't seem to agree with you. It's another case where my taste doesn't at all match the market. I'd rather like to buy a portable CD player or MP3 player, but the things I've seen on the shelves labeled MP3 players want to attach to your computer, and don't seem to have any provision for either a usb stick or a CD...so I assume that this means you need them plugged in while you're using them. Of course, you could use a smart-phone and some blue-tooth ear-buds...
I haven't tried to buy a watch in a couple of years, but the last time I looked I couldn't find any that weren't either expensive jewelry or unusable. This causes me to expect that in not too long I may be needing to rely on my phone for the time, but it won't be by preference.
You should read the Go masters commentary on the recent match. These "AI" thingies can come up with original ideas and implement them. And their original ideas can be better than those of any human expert. (They aren't always, of course.)
What all current AIs I've heard of are weak on is layered hierarchies of goals.
My thought was that it's a sign that solar panels have gotten a lot cheaper. If they're cheap enough it might be a good idea...though not for every purpose. (I mean the floating solar generator plant, not the desalinization idea. I haven't thought that one through. It seems like a floating desalinization plant shouldn't use that much power, since it would probably be based on solar evaporation.)
Well, you've excluded all web purchases I've ever seen. This may not be unreasonable, given the "contracts" and EULAs that are usually offered, but do realize what you're saying.
And have you gone to an Emergency Room recently? And been in NEED of urgent care?
I think your position is unreasonable. And I think most of the contracts I've seen offered to individuals by corporations should be declared unenforceable contracts of adhesion. That they aren't tells you who has power.
No. libertarians don't support deceptive business practices. Libertarians do support deceptive business practices in that they are opposed to all means possible for impeding them. (And while libertarians [lower case "l"] don't support deceptive business practices, they are incoherent about how they should be stopped.)
To say that you are opposed to something while at the same time being explicitly against all possible means of opposing it gives the lie to your original claim...or shows that you are incoherent.
You shouldn't. They are vaguely trustworthy for different things.
The amount you can trust a powerful person (without knowing the personal history) depends upon how much they will suffer from abusing your trust.
The "personal history" thing is because some people (most people actually, but not most people who become powerful) are well meaning and generally honest. If you can determine that the specific powerful person you are considering trusting is such a person, then it's reasonable to trust them a lot more. But this doesn't mean that you should trust their successors in power...and powerful people frequently change positions.
Odd comment. Based on prior stories I have included PayPal as one of the scam companies.
A better answer, though one that's bothersome, is to have a special limited credit card, and use that for web purchases. Many drugstores sell them, and probably many other places do too. But doing it that way is a bother. I've opted for a less secure way...I use two separate banks. One to store money, and one the handle transactions. The credit cards are linked to the one that only hold a small amount of cash at a time, and where I periodically refill the accounts. So you can choose your degree of security by deciding how much cash to hold in your transaction accounts.
When systemd is in use, installing on one partition makes the other partitions unbootable...unless they can be booted with SysV. This has been known for over a year, and, IIUC, has been marked "won't fix".
So I find systemd to be unusable. I like to test new systems without rendering my current system unusable.
To me this is clearly a fault system software fault. And that puts it clearly as Microsoft's fault.
You can call it a configuration issue if you want to, but the change in the configuration was made by a Microsoft patch, so it's still Microsoft's fault.
Or, I suppose you could say that the mistake was in applying a Microsoft approved update. But then you need to take some other approach to ensuring that your computer didn't get 0wn3d, and given the job that this computer had isolation from the internet isn't a viable solution.
It's a configuration issue, but most window managers will inform you occasionally (as settable intervals) if updates are available, or security updates. Still, the messages can be ignored if you're busy.
No, but it means that I don't believe their assertions, because they lie so often. And so I *expect* this is actually about encryption no matter what kind of story they fob off as a justifier. I don't *know* that that's true, but all I have to say that it's about something else is their word, and they lie more often than they tell the truth.
Well, I looked at your answer, and ...
Yeah, that would work, but UGH!! That's horribly ugly. And slow. I don't want to be needing to even convert numbers to strings and back, much less all that other garbage. That is literally a WORSE approach than re-writing in C++. Or even Vala. (OK, Vala may not work. The documentation is so terrible that I can't tell the syntax for many language features. And it *still* might be a better option.)
I think every successful programmer is probably an example of applying this advice. I've never met a successful programmer that hated programming, and most people hate programming. But the field has gotten more crowded, so perhaps many people are now doing it purely for the money.
Well, computers are faster now.
FWIW, modern Fortran is an excellent language that doesn't get enough respect. But that isn't enough to make me use it. Partially because, since it doesn't get enough respect, most libraries that I would need are foreign function calls.
Apparently, but you don't seem to have any reason for your opinion. I'm torn between whether you're a particularly stupid chatbot, or an inept troll.
Yeah, but last I checked pypy only handled python2, not python3. (They were either working on it, or planning to work on it, I don't remember which.)
Unfortunately, what I need isn't exactly speed, but binary mapping of structs (no pointers allowed) to disk blocks. So python is out. The GIL would make using it a headache anyway. (Again, not speed exactly, but simultaneous execution of different threads. Processes could be made to do in a pinch, so I could use multi-processing, but it would be a headache. ZMQ & C++ looks easier, even with the headaches that causes when handling unicode.)
Yes, but it would have been extremely useful if the new version of the language had a way to invoke the old version of the language built-in. Forwards compatibility is impossible, but backwards compatibility isn't. (Yes, that's a bit more extreme than backwards compatibility usually means, but then so is the change.)
What I'm asking for isn't quite impossible. I'm asking for the new version to allow separate "compilation" in the old language, but to the new binary format. Python, after all, *IS* a compiler, it just compiles to a virtual machine that runs the code.
That's a *VERY* interesting assertion. There are a couple of Python2 libraries that I'd like to call from Python3, and there's some code that would be easier to write in Python2 than in Python3...so how do you do it? Even better, got any good links?
Well, that makes sense, and explains the attention that numPy gets (also Cython), but I have a hard time believing that it's THAT large a percentage of the developer community.
My guess is that it's largely age related, which some large effect coming from "leading from the top". Guido is rather easy-going, and he doesn't encourage others to be harsh or abrupt.
I pretty much agree, but the other guy's point about threading is spot on. Python doesn't have concurrent execution of threads, but only of processes. This can lead to some fierce work-arounds and hard problems. Multi-processing requires multiple python interpreters to be loaded (one/process). Etc. So does any other approach to concurrent execution. (ZMQ comes to mind, but I generally don't use that to start another python process, except while in the process of rewriting something into a different language so that I *don't* need to start up another python process.)
Still, that's a huge number of lines of code, and I don't see the reason. But, of course, I haven't studied the problem.
When you say "Freeloaders" do you mean the ISPs? They took government money to provide fast service, and then didn't build out, so that seems a charitable term to use for them.
Heinlein's Methuselah's Children had that as a sub-plot element. It's a bit dated, but pretty good. Long term effects are discussed in the sequel "Time Enough for Love", but that needed a better editor.
Probably, but I doubt that that will be her problem. Teleomere shortening is one of the body's defenses against cancer...and she's apparently turned that off. There may also be a similar reason for stem cell depletion, though I've never heard of one for certain, only a couple of things that suggest that stem cells are more likely to turn cancerous than other cells. And the word is suggest, as there are other findings that suggest that senescent cells are the ones most likely to turn cancerous.