Great in that I can get cheap natural lighting indoors.
Not great in that it does nothing to help me with my lighting problems when it's actually dark out, which is when I need light the most. If you think about it, this is an improvement on the window, not the light bulb.
Also, I bet those tubes present opportunities for leaks.
Whoever modded me funny, I'm serious. AOL's ToS makes it a very untrustworthy application, and by extension, makes the entire Oscar protocol untrustworthy.
Yeah, he was. The mainstream news decided to focus on the whole of his life and now the Watergate scandal and his resignation in disgrace from the presidency. Millions of people I'm sure disagreed, but if you look for his obituary or other articles written about him, they are fairly glowing.
This is just like the seventeen minutes of silence on the Nixon tapes during the Watergate break-in investigation. Somehow, when Nixon died, he was "remembered" as a great American. How can we stand for this?
When there are two boob-shaped areas of my screen that appear to be burned in more than the rest of my screen, then people will know about my, ahem, viewing habits.
I wasn't offering an absolute distinction; as I said, if I had the means to type a PhD thesis into Slashdot, I'd do it, but I don't.
"Natural language" does not allow totally ungrammatical statements, as you've pointed out. Fault tolerance does not imply fault invulnerability. It's also possible to speak a completely grammatical natural language to a foreigner and have them not understand a thing you say.
As for Perl, I'm a philosopher, not a perl programmer, and my knowledge of programming languages stops somewhere around Pascal or BASIC. But I would expect that if you tried to call an undefined variable, it wouldn't "know" what you were telling it, and would be unable to proceed.
I find this concept of a "guesser" to be intriguing, but I would suspect that we presently do not have the kind of guessing technology that approaches the natural language facility of human speakers.
For example, a Perl interpreter may well be able to "guess" what you want to split when you give issue an ambiguous split instruction, but that is because it must have some explicit coding going on in the interpreter which tells it how to handle ambiguous syntax.
But if you try giving it an undefined instruction, it won't be able to handle it, will it? As I said, I don't know Perl, but if the instruction "foo" doesn't exist in Perl, and I wrote a Perl script that told the Perl interpreter to foo some data, I would expect it wouldn't be able to do what I had in mind. If I wanted to convey to Perl the meaning of "foo", I wouldn't be able to do so by saying "You know, to smurf it." I'd have to explicitly define it in a rigorous and unambiguous manner that is already defined from the axiomatic primitives that are legal in Perl syntax and ultimately translate into machine language.
On the other hand, if I tell a human office lackey to "foo" that data, he'll know based on other times he's heard the word "foo" even if it hasn't been explicitly declared between us with rigorous logical symbols what exactly it is to foo. In fact, we're quite comfortable using some words (like "good" or "art" for example) which are very difficult to define in such a rigorous fashion. We have arguments over them, and they're problematic words, but we can make use of them.
Programming languages have been for many years attempting to incorporate the ease-of-use of natural languages into their feature sets. Likewise, for hundreds of years academics have been trying to impose synthetic rules onto natural language to give it order and "improve" it.
It would not surprise me if some day one could speak to a computer and give it orders just as a military officer gives orders to a subordinate. But we're not there now.
I'd be interested to know exactly what the difference is between "natural" and "non-natural".
That's well worth exploring, and I don't have the means to do that in depth here. But, basically, a synthetic (or non-natural) language is one where the rules have been explicitly declared and set in stone in advance. A "natural" language is one which evolves and develops as it is used.
Natural languages are much more flexible and able to adapt on the fly and fault-tolerant, but this comes at the price of a lack of guarantee of precision and the possibility of ambiguity.
A few examples to help clarify:
If I mis-type "Two times four equals ate" in a natural language, you can read that statement and tell what I meant to say, and make sense of it and we can get along OK. Maybe if you're pedantic you'll correct my usage, but if you're in a hurry or don't care, it can slide and nothing bad happens. If I tried to pass the equivalent this statement through a synthetic language parser, it would flag the statement as meaningless and error out in some fashion and would be unable to proceed until the statement was corrected.
Wall is using a metaphor and anthropomorphising. A computer understands its programming language no more than a stone understands that gravity wants it to roll down hill, or a player piano understands that the holes punched into the roll of paper are music.
Computers follow programmed instructions because they have been cleverly constructed in such a way that their mechanisms trip in a particular way when the instructions are encoded into eletronic pulses and sent through its workings.
Nothing about the potential for natural language to be precise contradicts the fact that programming languages are non-natural.
It is a well-established fact that women are generally better with (human) languages,
Assuming this is true, computer programming languages are NOT natural languages. They're synthetic languages with hard rules made out of logic. Programming is more akin to mathematics. I'm sure women are capable of being excellent programmers and mathematicians, but a facility with natural language does with its lack of precision and clarity does not translate into the basis of a good programmer. That's not to say that being good with natural languages would be detrimental to programming aptitude, either, of course.
Mickey Rooney appeared slightly irritated at a press conference held in his Beverly Hills Mansion earlier today. "I was discovered over 70 years ago, and these astronomers claim they've got a smaller full-fledged star? Well I've got news for 'em."
This has happened a lot throughout history. Usually, it gets settled through war.
Re:Single video card not going to cut it?
on
SLI Primer
·
· Score: 1
I didn't say it was useless, just disagreeing strongly with the notion that a single video card won't cut it. Even for serious gamers, a single video card is fine. SLI is cool, it's just not going to make other video solutions obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
Not innovate, catch up. Name one true innovation in IE7.
Great in that I can get cheap natural lighting indoors.
Not great in that it does nothing to help me with my lighting problems when it's actually dark out, which is when I need light the most. If you think about it, this is an improvement on the window, not the light bulb.
Also, I bet those tubes present opportunities for leaks.
It's an exploit if you can't prevent someone from misusing 302, or to filter out malicious uses of 302 from legitimate ones.
--slashdotted.
Never underestimate the power of the slash.
Whoever modded me funny, I'm serious. AOL's ToS makes it a very untrustworthy application, and by extension, makes the entire Oscar protocol untrustworthy.
When will my anti-spyware apps start seeing AIM as spyware, and offering to remove it for me?
Yeah, he was. The mainstream news decided to focus on the whole of his life and now the Watergate scandal and his resignation in disgrace from the presidency. Millions of people I'm sure disagreed, but if you look for his obituary or other articles written about him, they are fairly glowing.
He died in 1996.
This is just like the seventeen minutes of silence on the Nixon tapes during the Watergate break-in investigation. Somehow, when Nixon died, he was "remembered" as a great American. How can we stand for this?
That doesn't stop it from being a good joke, though.
If this is really so important, why not switch to white text on black background for mobile devices? This would maximize the amount of dim pixels.
When there are two boob-shaped areas of my screen that appear to be burned in more than the rest of my screen, then people will know about my, ahem, viewing habits.
I wasn't offering an absolute distinction; as I said, if I had the means to type a PhD thesis into Slashdot, I'd do it, but I don't.
"Natural language" does not allow totally ungrammatical statements, as you've pointed out. Fault tolerance does not imply fault invulnerability. It's also possible to speak a completely grammatical natural language to a foreigner and have them not understand a thing you say.
As for Perl, I'm a philosopher, not a perl programmer, and my knowledge of programming languages stops somewhere around Pascal or BASIC. But I would expect that if you tried to call an undefined variable, it wouldn't "know" what you were telling it, and would be unable to proceed.
I find this concept of a "guesser" to be intriguing, but I would suspect that we presently do not have the kind of guessing technology that approaches the natural language facility of human speakers.
For example, a Perl interpreter may well be able to "guess" what you want to split when you give issue an ambiguous split instruction, but that is because it must have some explicit coding going on in the interpreter which tells it how to handle ambiguous syntax.
But if you try giving it an undefined instruction, it won't be able to handle it, will it? As I said, I don't know Perl, but if the instruction "foo" doesn't exist in Perl, and I wrote a Perl script that told the Perl interpreter to foo some data, I would expect it wouldn't be able to do what I had in mind. If I wanted to convey to Perl the meaning of "foo", I wouldn't be able to do so by saying "You know, to smurf it." I'd have to explicitly define it in a rigorous and unambiguous manner that is already defined from the axiomatic primitives that are legal in Perl syntax and ultimately translate into machine language.
On the other hand, if I tell a human office lackey to "foo" that data, he'll know based on other times he's heard the word "foo" even if it hasn't been explicitly declared between us with rigorous logical symbols what exactly it is to foo. In fact, we're quite comfortable using some words (like "good" or "art" for example) which are very difficult to define in such a rigorous fashion. We have arguments over them, and they're problematic words, but we can make use of them.
Programming languages have been for many years attempting to incorporate the ease-of-use of natural languages into their feature sets. Likewise, for hundreds of years academics have been trying to impose synthetic rules onto natural language to give it order and "improve" it.
It would not surprise me if some day one could speak to a computer and give it orders just as a military officer gives orders to a subordinate. But we're not there now.
I'd be interested to know exactly what the difference is between "natural" and "non-natural".
That's well worth exploring, and I don't have the means to do that in depth here. But, basically, a synthetic (or non-natural) language is one where the rules have been explicitly declared and set in stone in advance. A "natural" language is one which evolves and develops as it is used.
Natural languages are much more flexible and able to adapt on the fly and fault-tolerant, but this comes at the price of a lack of guarantee of precision and the possibility of ambiguity.
A few examples to help clarify:
If I mis-type "Two times four equals ate" in a natural language, you can read that statement and tell what I meant to say, and make sense of it and we can get along OK. Maybe if you're pedantic you'll correct my usage, but if you're in a hurry or don't care, it can slide and nothing bad happens. If I tried to pass the equivalent this statement through a synthetic language parser, it would flag the statement as meaningless and error out in some fashion and would be unable to proceed until the statement was corrected.
Nope, I'm not.
Wall is using a metaphor and anthropomorphising. A computer understands its programming language no more than a stone understands that gravity wants it to roll down hill, or a player piano understands that the holes punched into the roll of paper are music.
Computers follow programmed instructions because they have been cleverly constructed in such a way that their mechanisms trip in a particular way when the instructions are encoded into eletronic pulses and sent through its workings.
Nothing about the potential for natural language to be precise contradicts the fact that programming languages are non-natural.
Um, the baby boomers are pushing 60. If they haven't had kids by now, it ain't gonna happen.
It is a well-established fact that women are generally better with (human) languages,
Assuming this is true, computer programming languages are NOT natural languages. They're synthetic languages with hard rules made out of logic. Programming is more akin to mathematics. I'm sure women are capable of being excellent programmers and mathematicians, but a facility with natural language does with its lack of precision and clarity does not translate into the basis of a good programmer. That's not to say that being good with natural languages would be detrimental to programming aptitude, either, of course.
I have a cable modem, and even with bitttorrent, it still can take a few days or more for a DVD-sized amount of, ah, linux isos to download.
By contrast, I can drive down to the store and return to my house with a shitload of DVDs in less than an hour.
True Ressurrection.
Even with mechanical advantages, geeks are still wimps.
Mickey Rooney appeared slightly irritated at a press conference held in his Beverly Hills Mansion earlier today. "I was discovered over 70 years ago, and these astronomers claim they've got a smaller full-fledged star? Well I've got news for 'em."
All your caida are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
So? In America, people pay about half that much every month for cable.
This has happened a lot throughout history. Usually, it gets settled through war.
I didn't say it was useless, just disagreeing strongly with the notion that a single video card won't cut it. Even for serious gamers, a single video card is fine. SLI is cool, it's just not going to make other video solutions obsolete.