Once I had a job at a Very Large Telecom Corporation and as a requirement of getting an email account, I was required to attend an e-mail orientation session, which consisted of a PowerPoint talk given by someone in the IT/Email dept. The speaker trumpeted the fact that prior to the procurement of their latest email system, each email had cost the company $1000 to deliver. The new system was much more economical--I don't recall the figure now.
Needless to say, the talk contained no useful information at all.
Higher level constructs are great, but I also wonder, why is everyone so hot to use multiple threads? For many problems, multiple processes work fine, allowing you to use your multiple cores with bulletproof separation of memory spaces (a basic advance we've had since the '60s).
After many years of making myself miserable thinking like this, I've realized that--at least in software--money and quality just don't go together. My advice:
Try to do as good as you can at work, knowing in advance that the results will be fully compromised. The purpose of this work is to make money so that you can support your family--that's it.
Do outside work on at least one Free Software (or OSS) project that meets your standards for quality. This is where you get your professional satisfaction.
Perl is readable to those that know Perl. I know Perl and I find idiomatic Perl readable. The question isn't whether or not those who know a language find it readable. Of course they do. The question is how readable the language is to those who haven't studied the language for years, and how much study it takes before the language is readable. In this sense, Perl is quite a poor language.
And "job security" language choices is just as much a problem with regular employees as consultants. As a consultant there's been more then one occasion where I had to go and clean up the mess after some bored employee made an "interesting" language or framework choice presumably to keep themselves interested. If I seem bitter, it's because 98% of the messes I have to clean up are written in Perl. The best thing I can say for Perl (and C++) right now is that it's a great "crap magnet". That is, if something's not written in Perl, there's a much better chance in practice that it's reasonably well written.
Which is done by restricting the freedoms of the programmer and distributor. The GPL people tend to conveniently forget about that. The FSF in general seems to think their worst enemies are programmers, and I really don't see any reason why programmers should trust them, if they don't trust programmers. Oh please! What a load of crap...
Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story. No. For one thing, the strains of rice eaten in Asia have a lower glycemic index than those in America, which may affect things. More importantly, though, can you think of any other significant difference between Asians and "us"? Could it be...genes?
Excess calories make you fat. That's a law of physics; I have no idea why some people dispute it. It's like arguing with the law of gravity. The only question is whether calories coming from different sources are absorbed more slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same unless you're exercising to stay in shape. A calorie is a unit of energy and if that energy is not used, it must be stored. Energy doesn't just disappear into thin air; when you consume it, you either use it or you store it. No. Eating a lot of excess calories would very likely make you fat, but that does not mean that if you're fat, you got that way by eating more calories than those around you. And yes, energy can disappear into thin air--in particular, it can be "wasted" as heat, as the result of futile chemical cycles, etc.
Not rocket science. And we've got all the knowledge we need. No, it's not--it's a lot more complicated than that. If it were even reasonably simple, the solution would have been figured out by now. It's a very complex problem.
You're operating under a misunderstanding. When you go to the bank and ask for "your money", they don't give you back the bills that they've been keeping in a drawer somewhere. The money has been invested, etc.
Likewise in this case, the money that you're giving will be spent in the way that the program feels will be most productive to their overall goals. Be happy about this! They know a lot more about the details than we do...
The bags could come out hanging from an overhead conveyor that would automatically jerk your bag away from you the first few times you reach for it. Customers willing to pay for premium service would only have to jump a few times. They'd also get to watch economy class passengers jump a dozen times for theirs. As an added bonus, they could sell tickets to the general public to watch the spectacle. Family fun for all!!!
It was a nice idea, but in practice, corporations are just not able to restrain themselves from grave unethical abuse of copyright laws. Society as a whole would be much better off if we simply void all of copyright law (patents, too, but that's a different post).
Mike
Gosh, it's designed by a surgeon! Wow! That's gotta be way better than, say, having it designed by a gamer or an engineer! I want a car that's been designed by a surgeon! And a house! And I think surgeons should write the tunes for Brittany Spears' next album...
It tests two things: being able to stay awake, and being able to break laws and get away with it. Here they are tearing across the country in a car filled with distracting devices, sleep deprivation, fatigue, driving at unsafe speeds near vehicles filled with normal people trying to get to work or school. Hmm. This sounds amazingly familiar, for some reason...
There's a nice circa 1980 sci fi novel called Empire of Time by Crawford Killian that uses this as a main plot device. Spoiler: It turns out that life on earth is destroyed by a set of orbiting satellites designed to be used as a telescope, but aimed at the sun instead.
I'd say post it, with a description including the caveats you just gave. Even if no one is interested now, sometime in the next 100 years or so, computers will learn or be taught (depending on your point of view) how to program, and having a nice, big corpus of Open Source software to learn from will be useful in accelerating that process.
Mike
Why do I have to import Regular expression or Strings in python? To avoid bloating the core syntax of the language. For Python, one can learn that in a day or two tops, and then learn the modules one needs to know as needed. And if you see something new, it's not mysterious because it will generally have the module name in front of it (e.g., "cgi.escape"), so you know just where to go to learn about it.
With Perl, to be able to read the core language, you have to know how
0_0_0 x x x 1_1_1 . . . 2_2_2
parses and what it means. You have to know that how an expression like
x +2
is even parsed depends upon how 'x' is defined.
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. I think you do. You may think that you know what a regular expression like/$foo[bar]/ means, but you almost certainly don't.
Perl may have its virtues, but it's definitely a big, hairy, sweaty, greasy, stinky, drooling beast of a language.
Solaris 10 ships with bash by default. Really? This is about 10 years overdue, but still, I'll give them due credit for finally fixing this.
More generally, I think Solaris's only real chance is to merge or semi-merge with Debian/Ubuntu. Their kernel could become another supported platform, and they'd gain the 20000+ existing packages--the lack of which currently make Solaris a non-starter. If they did this, I would seriously look at their stuff.
More realistically, I think they'll do with Solaris what they did with Java, which is basically slow death.
but it does appear to be a polynomial algorithm You could say that, but since it requires an exponential number (e.g., N^N) photons, it's not clear that this is really an improvement.
It'd be a little like having an polynomial time algorithm that required exponential space. Interesting oddity, but unfortunately not useful in itself.
This is hardly worthy of front page news, except for the fact that most people think the Red Cross is a good organisation. It's worthy of front page news because most of us thought of Johnson and Johnson as a good organization. Now we know that that is not true.
Slashdot Mirror
so they can filter away for all I care!
Needless to say, the talk contained no useful information at all.
Higher level constructs are great, but I also wonder, why is everyone so hot to use multiple threads? For many problems, multiple processes work fine, allowing you to use your multiple cores with bulletproof separation of memory spaces (a basic advance we've had since the '60s).
Seriously, does anyone really think that any country in the world can be prevented from acquiring ~200 PCs?
...If it was, our problems would be over.
- Try to do as good as you can at work, knowing in advance that the results will be fully compromised. The purpose of this work is to make money so that you can support your family--that's it.
- Do outside work on at least one Free Software (or OSS) project that meets your standards for quality. This is where you get your professional satisfaction.
Good luck. MikeBefore, if my Amazon order was late, I'd just chalk it up to bad luck or whatever. Now I'll assume that it's Amazon being a bunch of fuckers...
Asians eat carbs with almost every meal (rice, noodles). They are thinner than us. End of story.
No. For one thing, the strains of rice eaten in Asia have a lower glycemic index than those in America, which may affect things. More importantly, though, can you think of any other significant difference between Asians and "us"? Could it be...genes? Excess calories make you fat. That's a law of physics; I have no idea why some people dispute it. It's like arguing with the law of gravity. The only question is whether calories coming from different sources are absorbed more slowly or quickly, but the end result is the same unless you're exercising to stay in shape. A calorie is a unit of energy and if that energy is not used, it must be stored. Energy doesn't just disappear into thin air; when you consume it, you either use it or you store it. No. Eating a lot of excess calories would very likely make you fat, but that does not mean that if you're fat, you got that way by eating more calories than those around you. And yes, energy can disappear into thin air--in particular, it can be "wasted" as heat, as the result of futile chemical cycles, etc. Not rocket science. And we've got all the knowledge we need. No, it's not--it's a lot more complicated than that. If it were even reasonably simple, the solution would have been figured out by now. It's a very complex problem.
You're operating under a misunderstanding. When you go to the bank and ask for "your money", they don't give you back the bills that they've been keeping in a drawer somewhere. The money has been invested, etc. Likewise in this case, the money that you're giving will be spent in the way that the program feels will be most productive to their overall goals. Be happy about this! They know a lot more about the details than we do...
The bags could come out hanging from an overhead conveyor that would automatically jerk your bag away from you the first few times you reach for it. Customers willing to pay for premium service would only have to jump a few times. They'd also get to watch economy class passengers jump a dozen times for theirs. As an added bonus, they could sell tickets to the general public to watch the spectacle. Family fun for all!!!
It was a nice idea, but in practice, corporations are just not able to restrain themselves from grave unethical abuse of copyright laws. Society as a whole would be much better off if we simply void all of copyright law (patents, too, but that's a different post). Mike
Gosh, it's designed by a surgeon! Wow! That's gotta be way better than, say, having it designed by a gamer or an engineer! I want a car that's been designed by a surgeon! And a house! And I think surgeons should write the tunes for Brittany Spears' next album...
There's a nice circa 1980 sci fi novel called Empire of Time by Crawford Killian that uses this as a main plot device. Spoiler: It turns out that life on earth is destroyed by a set of orbiting satellites designed to be used as a telescope, but aimed at the sun instead.
I'd say post it, with a description including the caveats you just gave. Even if no one is interested now, sometime in the next 100 years or so, computers will learn or be taught (depending on your point of view) how to program, and having a nice, big corpus of Open Source software to learn from will be useful in accelerating that process. Mike
With all due respect, can Microsoft even spell RFC?
With Perl, to be able to read the core language, you have to know how
parses and what it means. You have to know that how an expression like is even parsed depends upon how 'x' is defined. Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. I think you do. You may think that you know what a regular expression likePerl may have its virtues, but it's definitely a big, hairy, sweaty, greasy, stinky, drooling beast of a language.
More generally, I think Solaris's only real chance is to merge or semi-merge with Debian/Ubuntu. Their kernel could become another supported platform, and they'd gain the 20000+ existing packages--the lack of which currently make Solaris a non-starter. If they did this, I would seriously look at their stuff.
More realistically, I think they'll do with Solaris what they did with Java, which is basically slow death.
Volume discounts available for the major religions.
...and in keeping with current policies, this should be a faith-based initiative.
It'd be a little like having an polynomial time algorithm that required exponential space. Interesting oddity, but unfortunately not useful in itself.