You would actually want to code on a 10" netbook form factor keyboard?
Sure, why not? The keyboard would be a tad cramped, granted, but how much screen real-estate do you need for a screen session with Vim running in it? It'd probably make a decent little device for hacking a bit of code while hanging out at the local coffee shop.
Good lord... 1.6Ghz CPU and a gig of RAM will make "doing more than one thing at once... painful"?? You must have a very low threshold for pain.
I'd love something like that just to have documentation on one screen while I code on the other. Or to have email/IRC/whatever open on one screen while I browse on the other.
It nevertheless should tell you something that criticism of Wikipedia is now so widespread
By that argument, the fact that there are all those anti-vaxxers and creationists tells us something...
But, of course, it doesn't. What it tells us is that there's a loud group of people who like to criticize Wikipedia, many of which are disgrunted ex-editors and ex-admins, and a bunch of bandwagon jumpers.
Yeah, bullshit, buddy. Nanotubes are touted as next generation batteries, circuit boards, solar cells, bullet proof armor, space elevator cables, and god knows what else. They're practically a magical panacea if you believe researchers.
As for printable circuit boards, yup, you got me there. They're manufactured in the lab... kinda like algae-based power sources.
Kinda OT but related. Swine flu vaccinations - about 10^5 people die from the (regular) flu every year. Swine flu has claimed what, 10^2?
Umm... you *are* aware that the flu season has just started, right? That that 10^2 people who've died did so when there should never have been a flu going around in the first place?
Besides which, assuming a successful vaccination campaign, the numbers *should* be low.
The problem, of course, is that just like the stimulus packages passed by congress, success means nothing bad happens. So the nay-sayers can claim nothing bad would've happened either way, while the proponents say that things would've been worse without the intervention. In both cases, the only way to be provably right is for very bad things to happen.
As for the rest, your little tirade about SUV cameras has precisely *zero* to do with environmentalism. Meanwhile, only a child or an idiot complains when they're told they shouldn't do something because it's provably bad for them. Or do you bitch about doctors because those bastards tell you not to eat salty foods?
"Green tech" is hardly the only industry guilty of making wild claims.
But hey, why not take the opportunity to take a pot shot as those pesky environmentalists, eh? If anything, it's always worth a few modpoints here on Slashdot...
I'm confused... how the hell is it wpa_supplicant's job to support specific wifi chipsets/cards? Isn't it the kernel's job to implement drivers for each card while exposing a general API that wpa_supplicant then uses?
What makes you think I'm white? My skin color has no bearing on my argument.
You're right, it doesn't. OTOH, I doubt a black person would go around defending the practice of denigrating blacks by likening them to apes, nor is a black person likely to bring up the spectre of reverse racism.
But you're absolutely right, it's an assumption on my part, and I apologize for making it.
My ancestors never had anything to do with the slave trade. If yours did that's a shame, but unless you were involved yourself you have nothing to feel guilty for.
Who said anything about guilt? I don't feel guilty, and neither should you. And you're right, whether or not your ancestors were involved in the slave trade is entirely beside the point, and I should've phrased my statement differently.
Nevertheless, the point is this: we're talking about historical precedent and its effect on social morays. Historical precedent means that likening a black man to an ape is taken as a reference to the now-anachronistic belief that coloured people were subhuman, and the consequent exploitation of them in the slave trade. If you don't like that fact, great, go back in time and change it. But until you do, that's the way it is, and likely will continue to be the way it is for quite some time to come, whether you like it or not.
Wow, you didn't even read the fucking definition, did you? Here, let me help:
Racism: "a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others." "hatred or intolerance of another race or other races."
Get it now? See how the definition inherently includes the idea of *hatred and superiority*? *That* is racism.
Again, you can change the definition to suit what you want to believe, but that doesn't make your views any less absurd.
Clearly your definition of racism is different from mine. I view racism as any act that distinguishes somebody on their race.
Yes, it is different.
Racism == *denigrating* someone based on their race.
Portraying Bush as an Ape == denigrating Bush because he was perceived as a moron. Portraying Michelle Obama as an Ape == denigrating her based on her race.
Conversely, note that your average liberal doesn't yell "RACIST!" when someone refers to how smart and dedicated Japanese students supposedly are.
So it's a sick hate crime to compare a black man or woman with a monkey. Yet it's fine to compare a white man to a monkey?
That's exactly right. It's called history, jackass.
Historically, coloured people have been viewed as sub-human by their white masters. That's just reality. So why should you be surprised that it's offensive to portray a black man as an ape, but not a white man? Answer: You shouldn't, unless you want to pretend the past didn't happen, which is an absolutely fantastic way to not learn from it.
In short, get off your high horse of "reverse racism". No, you are not allowed to portray a black man as an ape because your white ancestors decided they were property. Live with it.
Sounds to me like your definition of "pointsfree" is *way* too broad. Wikipedia's article on the topic (which refers to it as 'tacit programming') describes it as:
a programming paradigm in which a function definition does not include information regarding its arguments, using combinators and function composition (but not -abstraction) instead of variables.
Which bears only a superficial resemblance to what you're describing. And as you say, your definition would apply to virtually every programming language on the planet. As such, it seems pretty... well... pointless.:)
Additionally, once it is shown that a memory location is fixed, and not accessed by another function, then important additional optimizations are allowed, including optimizing out instructions involving constants.
Funny you would use that statement to demonstrate how Haskell isn't good for HPC, considering that a pure functional language *has no mutable variables*, which theoretically enables a whole new class of optimizations.
As for the rest, TBH, I'm not sure what your point is. Haskell isn't dynamically typed, so nothing stops you from writing a highly optimized, unrolled version of, say, a matrix multiply if the matrix contains Integers (or whichever primitive type you prefer).
TBH, I think the real reason you won't see Haskell used in HPC applications any time soon is laziness. It's just too difficult for programmers to reason about performance in the face of laziness (despite the potential performance wins it could, in theory, provide).
a) Haskell is not actually purely functional: it is a purely functional core sub-language with extremely well controlled additional side-effect-producing parts
b) Monads are not actually considered "part" of the Haskell language, in the same way that pre-standardization STL was not "part" of the C++ language.
c) I'm completely missing something.
It's sort've a combination of b and c.
Think of a Monad as a general way of modeling some sort of computation. There are many kinds of computation that can be, and one of them is a computation that makes use of side-effects. In such a computation, the "world" state is threaded through the computation, so when you, say, read from a file, you end up with a function that takes the "world", a file handle, and returns a new "world", and a string. But all that detail is hidden from you by the IO monad, which takes care of handling that state threading for you.
But the important thing, here, is that the concept of a Monad is completely general. But even more surprising, a Monad, which models stateful computation, can be implemented in pure Haskell. And so IO, ST, and others, are really just libraries on top of Haskell which allow one to perform stateful computation within the context of a pure language. It is important to note, though, that, in general, non-monadic code can't call monadic code. So, for example, a pure function can't go and call an IO monad directly. In this way, the impure code is isolated away from the pure code, thus allowing the programmer to apply state where it's appropriate, but to ensure it's kept in it's own little box where it can't hurt anyone else.
Now, the consequence of this is that, conceptually, Haskell programs are inevitably built with a shell of code running with an IO Monad, and a functional core which implements the interesting bits of the program. You can, of course, write an entire application within an IO Monad, but that sort've defeats the purpose of using a pure language like Haskell.
Of course it can, why not? Haskell *does* allow modeling stateful computations, you just have to encapsulate it in a Monad. So break out an ST Monad, do your in-place sort using an array, and voila, you're done.
* Support for a points-free programming style in which things can be passed from one function to another without naming them.
I'm utterly baffled you put this in the list. AFAICT, points-free programming in haskell is nothing more than a nifty curiosity, and *certainly* not "must-have". Honestly, how is:
func = a . b
Any better than
func x = a $ b x
? Hell, I often find points-free formulations *more* confusing, in general, than an equivalent, explicit formulation.
Well, yes and no. My understanding of the current state of autism research is that it's believed that changes in diagnostic procedure and criteria explain some of the increase, but not all of it.
'course, either way, it sure as hell ain't vaccines.
It could be worse. In Canada, our members in the House of Commons have to vote with their party or be removed from it (so votes on bills really are predetermined here).
No, they don't have to. Party discipline is a policy enforced by the parties, not parliamentary procedure. In fact, when the conservatives took power, they claimed they'd loosen the reigns on their people (unlike the Liberals, who were very strict when it came to party discipline). 'course, you can imagine how that turned out...
As an aside, someone will inevitably point out the issue of confidence votes. If an issue is a confidence measure and the measure is defeated, a new election must be held. But that still doesn't outlaw party members from voting against their party (it just makes it less likely on confidence motions, as no one wants to see their own party defeated).
You can make better money in games than in insurance software, and yes, I've done both professionally. To make better money in games, though, you have to work for one of the big studios, or get really really lucky.
You also have to be damn good so you can climb the ladder. As a peon, you'll get worked until you burn out and then spat out the other side, with nothing to show for it in the end.
Thanks, but no thanks. I prefer to avoid the sweatshops...
Not particularly, given this would be an opt-in process. It's no different than people choosing to use club cards at the grocery store... except, in this case, they get a free netbook out of the deal.
Would I do it? Meh, probably not. But for most people, I'd say they'd consider information about their personal browsing habits easily worth a free computer.
And this is all assuming your paranoid fantasy is even true.
You know, without the studies and some idea of the methodology, I can't help but be skeptical toward an article about the rise of narcissism in society written by someone who's schelping a book entitled "The Narcissism Epidemic" that they, in fact, co-authored...
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, if only they'd mentioned that somewhere in the article...
You would actually want to code on a 10" netbook form factor keyboard?
Sure, why not? The keyboard would be a tad cramped, granted, but how much screen real-estate do you need for a screen session with Vim running in it? It'd probably make a decent little device for hacking a bit of code while hanging out at the local coffee shop.
Good lord... 1.6Ghz CPU and a gig of RAM will make "doing more than one thing at once ... painful"?? You must have a very low threshold for pain.
I'd love something like that just to have documentation on one screen while I code on the other. Or to have email/IRC/whatever open on one screen while I browse on the other.
It nevertheless should tell you something that criticism of Wikipedia is now so widespread
By that argument, the fact that there are all those anti-vaxxers and creationists tells us something...
But, of course, it doesn't. What it tells us is that there's a loud group of people who like to criticize Wikipedia, many of which are disgrunted ex-editors and ex-admins, and a bunch of bandwagon jumpers.
Yeah, bullshit, buddy. Nanotubes are touted as next generation batteries, circuit boards, solar cells, bullet proof armor, space elevator cables, and god knows what else. They're practically a magical panacea if you believe researchers.
As for printable circuit boards, yup, you got me there. They're manufactured in the lab... kinda like algae-based power sources.
Kinda OT but related. Swine flu vaccinations - about 10^5 people die from the (regular) flu every year. Swine flu has claimed what, 10^2?
Umm... you *are* aware that the flu season has just started, right? That that 10^2 people who've died did so when there should never have been a flu going around in the first place?
Besides which, assuming a successful vaccination campaign, the numbers *should* be low.
The problem, of course, is that just like the stimulus packages passed by congress, success means nothing bad happens. So the nay-sayers can claim nothing bad would've happened either way, while the proponents say that things would've been worse without the intervention. In both cases, the only way to be provably right is for very bad things to happen.
As for the rest, your little tirade about SUV cameras has precisely *zero* to do with environmentalism. Meanwhile, only a child or an idiot complains when they're told they shouldn't do something because it's provably bad for them. Or do you bitch about doctors because those bastards tell you not to eat salty foods?
MRAM, "Spintronics" and Quantum Computers, Inkjet-printable circuit boards, anything involving carbon nanotubes...
"Green tech" is hardly the only industry guilty of making wild claims.
But hey, why not take the opportunity to take a pot shot as those pesky environmentalists, eh? If anything, it's always worth a few modpoints here on Slashdot...
I'm confused... how the hell is it wpa_supplicant's job to support specific wifi chipsets/cards? Isn't it the kernel's job to implement drivers for each card while exposing a general API that wpa_supplicant then uses?
What makes you think I'm white? My skin color has no bearing on my argument.
You're right, it doesn't. OTOH, I doubt a black person would go around defending the practice of denigrating blacks by likening them to apes, nor is a black person likely to bring up the spectre of reverse racism.
But you're absolutely right, it's an assumption on my part, and I apologize for making it.
My ancestors never had anything to do with the slave trade. If yours did that's a shame, but unless you were involved yourself you have nothing to feel guilty for.
Who said anything about guilt? I don't feel guilty, and neither should you. And you're right, whether or not your ancestors were involved in the slave trade is entirely beside the point, and I should've phrased my statement differently.
Nevertheless, the point is this: we're talking about historical precedent and its effect on social morays. Historical precedent means that likening a black man to an ape is taken as a reference to the now-anachronistic belief that coloured people were subhuman, and the consequent exploitation of them in the slave trade. If you don't like that fact, great, go back in time and change it. But until you do, that's the way it is, and likely will continue to be the way it is for quite some time to come, whether you like it or not.
Wow, you didn't even read the fucking definition, did you? Here, let me help:
Get it now? See how the definition inherently includes the idea of *hatred and superiority*? *That* is racism.
Again, you can change the definition to suit what you want to believe, but that doesn't make your views any less absurd.
Clearly your definition of racism is different from mine. I view racism as any act that distinguishes somebody on their race.
Yes, it is different.
Racism == *denigrating* someone based on their race.
Portraying Bush as an Ape == denigrating Bush because he was perceived as a moron.
Portraying Michelle Obama as an Ape == denigrating her based on her race.
Conversely, note that your average liberal doesn't yell "RACIST!" when someone refers to how smart and dedicated Japanese students supposedly are.
Get it now?
So it's a sick hate crime to compare a black man or woman with a monkey. Yet it's fine to compare a white man to a monkey?
That's exactly right. It's called history, jackass.
Historically, coloured people have been viewed as sub-human by their white masters. That's just reality. So why should you be surprised that it's offensive to portray a black man as an ape, but not a white man? Answer: You shouldn't, unless you want to pretend the past didn't happen, which is an absolutely fantastic way to not learn from it.
In short, get off your high horse of "reverse racism". No, you are not allowed to portray a black man as an ape because your white ancestors decided they were property. Live with it.
Sounds to me like your definition of "pointsfree" is *way* too broad. Wikipedia's article on the topic (which refers to it as 'tacit programming') describes it as:
Which bears only a superficial resemblance to what you're describing. And as you say, your definition would apply to virtually every programming language on the planet. As such, it seems pretty... well... pointless. :)
And once you have closures, you need garbage collection.
You might want to tell that to Apple...
Additionally, once it is shown that a memory location is fixed, and not accessed by another function, then important additional optimizations are allowed, including optimizing out instructions involving constants.
Funny you would use that statement to demonstrate how Haskell isn't good for HPC, considering that a pure functional language *has no mutable variables*, which theoretically enables a whole new class of optimizations.
As for the rest, TBH, I'm not sure what your point is. Haskell isn't dynamically typed, so nothing stops you from writing a highly optimized, unrolled version of, say, a matrix multiply if the matrix contains Integers (or whichever primitive type you prefer).
TBH, I think the real reason you won't see Haskell used in HPC applications any time soon is laziness. It's just too difficult for programmers to reason about performance in the face of laziness (despite the potential performance wins it could, in theory, provide).
a) Haskell is not actually purely functional: it is a purely functional core sub-language with extremely well controlled additional side-effect-producing parts
b) Monads are not actually considered "part" of the Haskell language, in the same way that pre-standardization STL was not "part" of the C++ language.
c) I'm completely missing something.
It's sort've a combination of b and c.
Think of a Monad as a general way of modeling some sort of computation. There are many kinds of computation that can be, and one of them is a computation that makes use of side-effects. In such a computation, the "world" state is threaded through the computation, so when you, say, read from a file, you end up with a function that takes the "world", a file handle, and returns a new "world", and a string. But all that detail is hidden from you by the IO monad, which takes care of handling that state threading for you.
But the important thing, here, is that the concept of a Monad is completely general. But even more surprising, a Monad, which models stateful computation, can be implemented in pure Haskell. And so IO, ST, and others, are really just libraries on top of Haskell which allow one to perform stateful computation within the context of a pure language. It is important to note, though, that, in general, non-monadic code can't call monadic code. So, for example, a pure function can't go and call an IO monad directly. In this way, the impure code is isolated away from the pure code, thus allowing the programmer to apply state where it's appropriate, but to ensure it's kept in it's own little box where it can't hurt anyone else.
Now, the consequence of this is that, conceptually, Haskell programs are inevitably built with a shell of code running with an IO Monad, and a functional core which implements the interesting bits of the program. You can, of course, write an entire application within an IO Monad, but that sort've defeats the purpose of using a pure language like Haskell.
Of course it can, why not? Haskell *does* allow modeling stateful computations, you just have to encapsulate it in a Monad. So break out an ST Monad, do your in-place sort using an array, and voila, you're done.
* Support for a points-free programming style in which things can be passed from one function to another without naming them.
I'm utterly baffled you put this in the list. AFAICT, points-free programming in haskell is nothing more than a nifty curiosity, and *certainly* not "must-have". Honestly, how is:
func = a . b
Any better than
func x = a $ b x
? Hell, I often find points-free formulations *more* confusing, in general, than an equivalent, explicit formulation.
Well, yes and no. My understanding of the current state of autism research is that it's believed that changes in diagnostic procedure and criteria explain some of the increase, but not all of it.
'course, either way, it sure as hell ain't vaccines.
It could be worse. In Canada, our members in the House of Commons have to vote with their party or be removed from it (so votes on bills really are predetermined here).
No, they don't have to. Party discipline is a policy enforced by the parties, not parliamentary procedure. In fact, when the conservatives took power, they claimed they'd loosen the reigns on their people (unlike the Liberals, who were very strict when it came to party discipline). 'course, you can imagine how that turned out...
As an aside, someone will inevitably point out the issue of confidence votes. If an issue is a confidence measure and the measure is defeated, a new election must be held. But that still doesn't outlaw party members from voting against their party (it just makes it less likely on confidence motions, as no one wants to see their own party defeated).
You can make better money in games than in insurance software, and yes, I've done both professionally. To make better money in games, though, you have to work for one of the big studios, or get really really lucky.
You also have to be damn good so you can climb the ladder. As a peon, you'll get worked until you burn out and then spat out the other side, with nothing to show for it in the end.
Thanks, but no thanks. I prefer to avoid the sweatshops...
Or you could just use a DTP system like the rest of the book-writing world...
Creeped out yet?
Not particularly, given this would be an opt-in process. It's no different than people choosing to use club cards at the grocery store... except, in this case, they get a free netbook out of the deal.
Would I do it? Meh, probably not. But for most people, I'd say they'd consider information about their personal browsing habits easily worth a free computer.
And this is all assuming your paranoid fantasy is even true.
I thought people were already trying to do this sort of thing using electroactive polymers. Certainly there seems to be a couple patents on the idea, not to mention someone who thinks the technology could be used to make braille-capable touchscreens.
You know, without the studies and some idea of the methodology, I can't help but be skeptical toward an article about the rise of narcissism in society written by someone who's schelping a book entitled "The Narcissism Epidemic" that they, in fact, co-authored...