Not quite. Weak is not the opposite of dynamic, but the opposite of strong. Type systems may be either weak or strong, and may be either dynamic or static.
A weak type system will allow implicit type conversions, even those that are 'lossy' or improper. For example, converting a float to an int without requiring a cast. Or, more importantly, treating memory references (pointers) identically to integers. Pointer arithmetic is an abuse of a weak typing system.
Strong typing requires explicit casts and will throw errors where casts do not appear. Java, Lisp, Python are all strongly typed. Haskell is _really_ strongly typed. When you cast a object to type Object in Java, you are losing type information, but you are doing it _explicitly_.
C, Pascal, and Java are statically typed. Variables are created with a specific type in the code, not on demand. Python and Lisp are dynamically typed -- a variable's type is determined at run-time.
For example, in C:
int foo( int a, int b );
declares a function that returns type 'int' and takes two arguments a, b, both of types 'int'.
In Python:
def foo( a, b ):
declares a function that may or may not return a value (and whose type is known only at run-time) and takes two arguments, which may be of any type (although, internally, the program likely assumes a type).
There are some quirks in the type systems of many languages. In Java, for example, "str" + 3 doesn't have any normal meaning, but the developers have defined any operation using a string as concatenation. In Python, and in most languages, such an expression will either return an error on compilation (static) or when running (dynamic).
However, all combinations are possible and type systems are a fertile area of research.
Java does not care about memory limits, the JVM does. The stock Sun JVM for x86 machines will address a maximum of 3-4 GiB (dependent on operating system). However, the IBM JVM on an AIX machine has no practical limit and can easily access >16 GiB memory, if available. If a JVM is so designed, there is no reason a Java program can access as much memory as a program written in C.
I run very large simulations on various platforms, and some of my simulations have to be run on a 64-bit machine because of the memory requirements. Sun's Java forums have several posts asking for various maximum heap (maximum memory accessable) for various platforms and you can find more exact numbers for specific platforms and operating systems there.
An object is an object, not a pointer. However, objects are accessed through a reference, which in implementation, is typically a pointer.
A 20 year plan for facility development is different than the 5 year plans the Soviets were doing. On one hand are developments that will take many years to bring up to operational status and then have many years of fruitful use, and on the other we have long range determinations of how many razors will be needed. Projects can be and should be planned for the long haul; budgets can rarely be predicted beyond a month, let alone a year. Much of the Soviet 5 years plans were not long-term projects, but simply very long range budgeting.
That aside, the Soviets were fairly successful when it came to large scale projects. Granted, when it came to Soviet construction projects, especially under Stalin, the policy was typically placing a small army of poorly trained and poorly equipped men together and telling them to work or get shot, but the projects were still eventually completed. However, when skilled scientists and engineers were in charge and given adequate resources, the Soviets were able to create both atomic and fusion bombs as well as a highly competitive space program.
[For more information, as well as an analysis of the long-term decline of Soviet science and engineering, I can recommend "The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham.]
Projects, as opposed to budgets, are more resilient to daily fluctuations and can be quite useful.
Now, whether the government should be doing 'big science' at all is a different argument.
The problem was that they did not correctly implement the ATAPI standard. If the drives received a certain ATAPI command, they would die. This is, of course, a violation of the ATAPI standard, as well as poor engineering. Thus, the "so-called" adjective was appropriate --- the drives were labeled ATAPI, but were not actually ATAPI.
It seems... odd... to compare Windows to a Symbolics Lisp machine. Certainly, one can compare the two in terms of ease of programming, power of expression, elegance of execution, and on and on. (_The Unix Hater's Handbook_ repeatedly compared Unix boxen to Lisp machines.)
However, to compare the two on security is non-sensical. The designers of the Lisp Machine were anti-security. Anyone could create an account for themselves by logging on as a generic user and then adding themselves to the user list. While doing so, they could also delete other users, edit any file, and moreso, edit the operating system. The OS was written in Lisp and users were encouraged to modify the OS to their needs. Edits were immediately applied; anything could alter anything.
While Lisp machines were resistant to buffer overflows, a cracker had no need for such holes. Want to read the files? Go ahead -- there was no file security mechanism. Want to launch a DDOS? Edit the network system (in real-time) to send packets continuously.
However poor Windows security may be, it is present. Lisp machines were all about access and access is what they gave.
What Lisp machines reveal is a certain attitude toward empowerment that has disappeared as the playing field has become more hostile.
Well, Ford does stuff about people stealing the CD player. In my car, the audio system sits inside an elliptic box, thus making the resale value of it minimal. Ford, as well as other car manufacturers, do take measures to make their vehicles more theft-resistant and less appetizing to thieves.
Essex and Sussex counties have already triggered filtering software, as genealogists have discovered. More interestingly, grammar checking software is often triggered by those two phrases as well, making them suggest that the author "avoid sexual phrases."
All verbiage within the show indicates that a phaser is meant to be an energy weapon. Phasers can run low on energy, but not ammo. (Actually, it seems that most societies in Star Trek have given up on projectile weapons (except for torpedos) in exchange for phasers or disruptors of some kind. If Starfleet actually went back to using projectile weapons (ie. perhaps submachine guns) then they would have a highly effective weapon against the Borg. This is demonstrated in "First Contact" with Picard on the holodeck. Of course, Starfleet never realizes that...) The speed of light is only valid in a vacuum, so, for some reason phasers fire beams that travel at very slow velocities. But, even still, phasers are energy weapons, not projectile or particle.
Belgium has a law that, whenever any company is going to lay a cable (primarily telecommunications), they have to advertise the fact and allow other companies to also use the 'hole.' So, a few years back, when the entire place was being dug up to lay fiber-optic, typically five companies would be cooperating to lay lines. Traffic, always a concern in European cities, was hopefully less impaired by this policy.
You're forgetting the Arabs. If you want something truly novel, try trigonometry. The entire concept, sine*, cosine, tangent, etc., was invented during the Middle Ages (by Arabs like Abu al-Wafa and Abu Nasr Mansur).
* The Hindus knew about sine, but they didn't understand it very well and certainly didn't extend the notion to the other sides of the triangle.
ISO is standardized like that. It also has the benefit that sort routines don't need any extra coding to handle dates. However, just spelling it out works well enough for humans (as long as you use three-letter months).
As an OU Student...
on
Buying Unix?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
First, I can personally attest that there is a subculture of Unix users at OU (University of Oklahoma) who use Unix extensively. Most people, at least engineers, eventually get acquainted with it. If student employment is a possibility, they can get someone to work on a Unix box. Second, Unix boxes seem to require less maintenance than a Window box; once you have the server up and running, you rarely have to mess with it except for web content changes. Remind him that Apache has greater market penetration that IIS and has a far better history, security-wise, than IIS. Lastly, 'atlas', which runs our mail and OU's web site, is a big Solaris box.
If someone ignores the Catholic ban on contraception , the Catholic church does not try to kill them. Circumcision is a medical procedure that is occasionally done without religious requirement. Nevertheless, circumcision does no more than remove the foreskin.
Remember, we live in the 20th century. A church, or any body except a nation, cannot simply declare war on another body legally. Things that were acceptable in the 13th century no longer apply. The court system, for example, is under government jurisdiction, not church. Thus, in the current controversy with child molesters and the Catholic church, the Catholic does not have the legal right to 'take care of the issue' themselves. Government enforces the laws and enforces them upon anyone, regardless of their religious preference.
In the United States, churchs are allowed to pursue their own form of worship as long as that form does not conflict with other laws. (The exceptions are relatively minor and mostly apply to Indian tribes and maintaining a culture.)
Some church heads are elected. The Pope is elected, for example (from the Cardinal College, I believe.) Furthermore, the church body often has the power to get rid of a minister and request another.
And finally, individuals have a right to leave a religion. Scientology does not hold this right and actively works against it, to the point of harrasement, kidnapping, brainwashing, and murder.
Religions are established within some philosophical or theological premise. Scientology, instead, was established to make money. L. Ron Hubbard admitted as such. Scientology actively lies to its members, discourages any dissent, and attempts to silence its critics.
Germany recognizes that Scientology is a scam, and it is thus illegal there. However, in the US, by hiding behind the tax-sheltered status of a church, Scientology has been able to grow and remain a threat for the past several decades.
Actually, it turns out that (like every other minor character in Star Wars), the Amanaman have a fairly well-developed history and anatomy. You can read all about it at STAR WARS: Amanaman.
Although Industrial Engineering (IE) reflects different problems than your more mechanical examples, IE is definitely engineering and its problems can be solved (conceptually) better with OOP. Why? Because IE deals with large-scale simulations involving multiple discrete parts. The systems cannot (typically) be represented by a system of differential systems, and instead must be modelled as independent parts communicating with each other. In other words, these are complex systems.
For example, I'm a research assistant in a project studying realtime promising. (Essentially, this project is looking at ways to determine the due date of an order quickly and accurately. This way we can avoid saying 6-8 weeks to deliver...) Although the different algorithms and heuristics could be included in a procedural or functional paradigm, the overall size of the system (>10,000 lines) along with the complex data types (some with more than 20 attributes) lends itself best to OOP. Earlier versions of the code were written in a more procedural fashion, but by moving toward a more OOP framework the code has become simpler and easier to manage.
Additionally, since this is research software, ease of making changes is a high priority. It is easier to be able to make changes to key systems without disturbing other code within an OOP system than with procedural or functional code. If the system was already well-understood, then a straight-forward procedural solution might be preferable.
I would like to add that my statements about functional programming do not include functional programming with objects (ala CLOS).
The concept of telling a story and then ending the series is not new at all. The original Star Trek was only supposed to run for five years -- thus, the 'five-year' mission. The same goes for many anime series. Most of the anime series are only budgeted for so long and the creators know that they have to finish the story within 24 or 36 or whatever episodes. The animators of Cowboy Bebop, for example, knew exactly how many episodes to make. Maison Ikkoku has a definite beginning, middle, and end.
It's not really about our short-attention spans, it's about telling a complete story. Few would say that books appeal to a limited attention span, but the authors do not try to write infinitely long running stories.
Drama is more powerful when people know the end, know that they have all the information and they recieve a revelation about someone's past next season which belies all they have seen so far.
Based on my knowledge, no. However, Xanadu would work exceedingly well. Xanadu is a hypertext system described by Ted Nelson which provides enourmous support for structuring and comparing data. Encyclopedias have a parallel structure - entries change over time, concepts are connected - that a better hypertext system than HTML is really needed to bring out the best of it.
Everything is a good example of a well-connected, deep collection of linked documents. However, Everything does not much in the way of structure, nor is it easy to compare documents or change how the structure is seen. An encyclopedia for today's world, additionally, would really demand graphics and video for some of the concepts. Certainly animals should be shown, not described. (Nelson's hypertext is much closer to hypermedia in today's parlance. Since Nelson invented the term hypertext, the change is due to misuse of the term.)
However, Xanadu has never been implemented fully. So, instead, the project may have to work through some sort of versioned, checked HTML (to verify links), and provide some powerful tools to search and manage the data.
IBM did do the software for Crosspad - they even released an SDK at IBM Handwriting with version for Java and C++. This is an adaption of that work. The problem with the Crosspad was, among other things, the time it took to resync work to the PC. This skips that step allowing for a much more fluid handwriting/typing interaction.
There is a general feeling at my high school that the handy board will no longer be used; many groups in our city (Norman - home of the Botball National Offices) have found that the batteries that the handyboard use have gone bad. The batteries are stored in a proprietary-pack that you have to special order, so it's quite annoying and potentially expensive to fix. (There may be a simple solution to this; I haven't seen one yet, though.)
When we went to the national competition we left the handyboard back at school and just used the RCX. I believe that the RCX, even with it's limited processing power and versatility, is a better platform for programming bots.
The RCX handles motors better. The problem we had with the handyboard was turning an exact angle - but as the bot was used, power would be drained, and the time it took (the only way we could control the motors) would lengthen. Very knotty problem! The RCX was better. Additionally, the RCX has several different languages that can be used, support for different OSs, and support for multiple programs on a single block
PDF is still a proprietary format (even though it is descended from postscript). Additionally, Adobe is not interested in keeping it stable. The latest PDF files can not be read in gv or converted using programs like pdf2ps. Even worse, users are required to upgrade to new versions of acroread, so the format is barely backwards compatible. If only the viewers existed for all the platforms that Adobe supports, DVI and ps would do the job in a much more open manner.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. Weak is not the opposite of dynamic, but the opposite of strong. Type systems may be either weak or strong, and may be either dynamic or static.
A weak type system will allow implicit type conversions, even those that are 'lossy' or improper. For example, converting a float to an int without requiring a cast. Or, more importantly, treating memory references (pointers) identically to integers. Pointer arithmetic is an abuse of a weak typing system.
Strong typing requires explicit casts and will throw errors where casts do not appear. Java, Lisp, Python are all strongly typed. Haskell is _really_ strongly typed. When you cast a object to type Object in Java, you are losing type information, but you are doing it _explicitly_.
C, Pascal, and Java are statically typed. Variables are created with a specific type in the code, not on demand. Python and Lisp are dynamically typed -- a variable's type is determined at run-time.
For example, in C:
int foo( int a, int b );
declares a function that returns type 'int' and takes two arguments a, b, both of types 'int'.
In Python:
def foo( a, b ):
declares a function that may or may not return a value (and whose type is known only at run-time) and takes two arguments, which may be of any type (although, internally, the program likely assumes a type).
There are some quirks in the type systems of many languages. In Java, for example, "str" + 3 doesn't have any normal meaning, but the developers have defined any operation using a string as concatenation. In Python, and in most languages, such an expression will either return an error on compilation (static) or when running (dynamic).
However, all combinations are possible and type systems are a fertile area of research.
Java does not care about memory limits, the JVM does. The stock Sun JVM for x86 machines will address a maximum of 3-4 GiB (dependent on operating system). However, the IBM JVM on an AIX machine has no practical limit and can easily access >16 GiB memory, if available. If a JVM is so designed, there is no reason a Java program can access as much memory as a program written in C.
I run very large simulations on various platforms, and some of my simulations have to be run on a 64-bit machine because of the memory requirements. Sun's Java forums have several posts asking for various maximum heap (maximum memory accessable) for various platforms and you can find more exact numbers for specific platforms and operating systems there.
An object is an object, not a pointer. However, objects are accessed through a reference, which in implementation, is typically a pointer.
A 20 year plan for facility development is different than the 5 year plans the Soviets were doing. On one hand are developments that will take many years to bring up to operational status and then have many years of fruitful use, and on the other we have long range determinations of how many razors will be needed. Projects can be and should be planned for the long haul; budgets can rarely be predicted beyond a month, let alone a year. Much of the Soviet 5 years plans were not long-term projects, but simply very long range budgeting.
That aside, the Soviets were fairly successful when it came to large scale projects. Granted, when it came to Soviet construction projects, especially under Stalin, the policy was typically placing a small army of poorly trained and poorly equipped men together and telling them to work or get shot, but the projects were still eventually completed. However, when skilled scientists and engineers were in charge and given adequate resources, the Soviets were able to create both atomic and fusion bombs as well as a highly competitive space program.
[For more information, as well as an analysis of the long-term decline of Soviet science and engineering, I can recommend "The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham.]
Projects, as opposed to budgets, are more resilient to daily fluctuations and can be quite useful.
Now, whether the government should be doing 'big science' at all is a different argument.
The problem was that they did not correctly implement the ATAPI standard. If the drives received a certain ATAPI command, they would die. This is, of course, a violation of the ATAPI standard, as well as poor engineering. Thus, the "so-called" adjective was appropriate --- the drives were labeled ATAPI, but were not actually ATAPI.
It seems... odd... to compare Windows to a Symbolics Lisp machine. Certainly, one can compare the two in terms of ease of programming, power of expression, elegance of execution, and on and on. (_The Unix Hater's Handbook_ repeatedly compared Unix boxen to Lisp machines.)
However, to compare the two on security is non-sensical. The designers of the Lisp Machine were anti-security. Anyone could create an account for themselves by logging on as a generic user and then adding themselves to the user list. While doing so, they could also delete other users, edit any file, and moreso, edit the operating system. The OS was written in Lisp and users were encouraged to modify the OS to their needs. Edits were immediately applied; anything could alter anything.
While Lisp machines were resistant to buffer overflows, a cracker had no need for such holes. Want to read the files? Go ahead -- there was no file security mechanism. Want to launch a DDOS? Edit the network system (in real-time) to send packets continuously.
However poor Windows security may be, it is present. Lisp machines were all about access and access is what they gave.
What Lisp machines reveal is a certain attitude toward empowerment that has disappeared as the playing field has become more hostile.
Well, Ford does stuff about people stealing the CD player. In my car, the audio system sits inside an elliptic box, thus making the resale value of it minimal. Ford, as well as other car manufacturers, do take measures to make their vehicles more theft-resistant and less appetizing to thieves.
Bide your time, for someday you will rule them all with an iron fist!
Essex and Sussex counties have already triggered filtering software, as genealogists have discovered. More interestingly, grammar checking software is often triggered by those two phrases as well, making them suggest that the author "avoid sexual phrases."
All verbiage within the show indicates that a phaser is meant to be an energy weapon. Phasers can run low on energy, but not ammo. (Actually, it seems that most societies in Star Trek have given up on projectile weapons (except for torpedos) in exchange for phasers or disruptors of some kind. If Starfleet actually went back to using projectile weapons (ie. perhaps submachine guns) then they would have a highly effective weapon against the Borg. This is demonstrated in "First Contact" with Picard on the holodeck. Of course, Starfleet never realizes that...) The speed of light is only valid in a vacuum, so, for some reason phasers fire beams that travel at very slow velocities. But, even still, phasers are energy weapons, not projectile or particle.
Belgium has a law that, whenever any company is going to lay a cable (primarily telecommunications), they have to advertise the fact and allow other companies to also use the 'hole.' So, a few years back, when the entire place was being dug up to lay fiber-optic, typically five companies would be cooperating to lay lines. Traffic, always a concern in European cities, was hopefully less impaired by this policy.
P.S. Belgium is north of Spain.
You're forgetting the Arabs. If you want something truly novel, try trigonometry. The entire concept, sine*, cosine, tangent, etc., was invented during the Middle Ages (by Arabs like Abu al-Wafa and Abu Nasr Mansur).
* The Hindus knew about sine, but they didn't understand it very well and certainly didn't extend the notion to the other sides of the triangle.
ISO is standardized like that. It also has the benefit that sort routines don't need any extra coding to handle dates. However, just spelling it out works well enough for humans (as long as you use three-letter months).
First, I can personally attest that there is a subculture of Unix users at OU (University of Oklahoma) who use Unix extensively. Most people, at least engineers, eventually get acquainted with it. If student employment is a possibility, they can get someone to work on a Unix box. Second, Unix boxes seem to require less maintenance than a Window box; once you have the server up and running, you rarely have to mess with it except for web content changes. Remind him that Apache has greater market penetration that IIS and has a far better history, security-wise, than IIS. Lastly, 'atlas', which runs our mail and OU's web site, is a big Solaris box.
If someone ignores the Catholic ban on contraception , the Catholic church does not try to kill them. Circumcision is a medical procedure that is occasionally done without religious requirement. Nevertheless, circumcision does no more than remove the foreskin.
Remember, we live in the 20th century. A church, or any body except a nation, cannot simply declare war on another body legally. Things that were acceptable in the 13th century no longer apply. The court system, for example, is under government jurisdiction, not church. Thus, in the current controversy with child molesters and the Catholic church, the Catholic does not have the legal right to 'take care of the issue' themselves. Government enforces the laws and enforces them upon anyone, regardless of their religious preference.
In the United States, churchs are allowed to pursue their own form of worship as long as that form does not conflict with other laws. (The exceptions are relatively minor and mostly apply to Indian tribes and maintaining a culture.)
Some church heads are elected. The Pope is elected, for example (from the Cardinal College, I believe.) Furthermore, the church body often has the power to get rid of a minister and request another.
And finally, individuals have a right to leave a religion. Scientology does not hold this right and actively works against it, to the point of harrasement, kidnapping, brainwashing, and murder.
Religions are established within some philosophical or theological premise. Scientology, instead, was established to make money. L. Ron Hubbard admitted as such. Scientology actively lies to its members, discourages any dissent, and attempts to silence its critics.
Germany recognizes that Scientology is a scam, and it is thus illegal there. However, in the US, by hiding behind the tax-sheltered status of a church, Scientology has been able to grow and remain a threat for the past several decades.
Scientology is a scam, not a religion.
Actually, it turns out that (like every other minor character in Star Wars), the Amanaman have a fairly well-developed history and anatomy. You can read all about it at STAR WARS: Amanaman.
Although Industrial Engineering (IE) reflects different problems than your more mechanical examples, IE is definitely engineering and its problems can be solved (conceptually) better with OOP. Why? Because IE deals with large-scale simulations involving multiple discrete parts. The systems cannot (typically) be represented by a system of differential systems, and instead must be modelled as independent parts communicating with each other. In other words, these are complex systems.
For example, I'm a research assistant in a project studying realtime promising. (Essentially, this project is looking at ways to determine the due date of an order quickly and accurately. This way we can avoid saying 6-8 weeks to deliver...) Although the different algorithms and heuristics could be included in a procedural or functional paradigm, the overall size of the system (>10,000 lines) along with the complex data types (some with more than 20 attributes) lends itself best to OOP. Earlier versions of the code were written in a more procedural fashion, but by moving toward a more OOP framework the code has become simpler and easier to manage.
Additionally, since this is research software, ease of making changes is a high priority. It is easier to be able to make changes to key systems without disturbing other code within an OOP system than with procedural or functional code. If the system was already well-understood, then a straight-forward procedural solution might be preferable.
I would like to add that my statements about functional programming do not include functional programming with objects (ala CLOS).
The concept of telling a story and then ending the series is not new at all. The original Star Trek was only supposed to run for five years -- thus, the 'five-year' mission. The same goes for many anime series. Most of the anime series are only budgeted for so long and the creators know that they have to finish the story within 24 or 36 or whatever episodes. The animators of Cowboy Bebop, for example, knew exactly how many episodes to make. Maison Ikkoku has a definite beginning, middle, and end.
It's not really about our short-attention spans, it's about telling a complete story. Few would say that books appeal to a limited attention span, but the authors do not try to write infinitely long running stories.
Drama is more powerful when people know the end, know that they have all the information and they recieve a revelation about someone's past next season which belies all they have seen so far.
Everything is a good example of a well-connected, deep collection of linked documents. However, Everything does not much in the way of structure, nor is it easy to compare documents or change how the structure is seen. An encyclopedia for today's world, additionally, would really demand graphics and video for some of the concepts. Certainly animals should be shown, not described. (Nelson's hypertext is much closer to hypermedia in today's parlance. Since Nelson invented the term hypertext, the change is due to misuse of the term.)
However, Xanadu has never been implemented fully. So, instead, the project may have to work through some sort of versioned, checked HTML (to verify links), and provide some powerful tools to search and manage the data.
IBM did do the software for Crosspad - they even released an SDK at IBM Handwriting with version for Java and C++. This is an adaption of that work. The problem with the Crosspad was, among other things, the time it took to resync work to the PC. This skips that step allowing for a much more fluid handwriting/typing interaction.
There is a general feeling at my high school that the handy board will no longer be used; many groups in our city (Norman - home of the Botball National Offices) have found that the batteries that the handyboard use have gone bad. The batteries are stored in a proprietary-pack that you have to special order, so it's quite annoying and potentially expensive to fix. (There may be a simple solution to this; I haven't seen one yet, though.) When we went to the national competition we left the handyboard back at school and just used the RCX. I believe that the RCX, even with it's limited processing power and versatility, is a better platform for programming bots. The RCX handles motors better. The problem we had with the handyboard was turning an exact angle - but as the bot was used, power would be drained, and the time it took (the only way we could control the motors) would lengthen. Very knotty problem! The RCX was better. Additionally, the RCX has several different languages that can be used, support for different OSs, and support for multiple programs on a single block
PDF is still a proprietary format (even though it is descended from postscript). Additionally, Adobe is not interested in keeping it stable. The latest PDF files can not be read in gv or converted using programs like pdf2ps. Even worse, users are required to upgrade to new versions of acroread, so the format is barely backwards compatible. If only the viewers existed for all the platforms that Adobe supports, DVI and ps would do the job in a much more open manner.