Given the expense of shorting a stock, it's not generally a very good idea even if one know that said stock will drop over the long haul. Pity, that, 'cause I'd short the hell out of both GOOG and MSFT.
Squeak's cool and all, but last time I looked around I couldn't find a single good online tutorial and reference for its MVC replacement (morphs, I think they're called). There were a few monkey-see, monkey-do tutorials, but nothing that explained the concepts behind morphs, or how to extend them, or how to deliver an application and so forth. It was a real disappointment.
Standard Time is real time. If you really have SAD, you'd be unhappy with or without DST--although you'd probably be happier without it, since the change in day length would be gradual.
You do realise that winter time is real time, right? Winter days are shorter than summer days, no matter what (well, except on the equator). If you don't like short winter days, move to a lower lattitude.
DST makes one get up earlier in the summer; it has no effect on winter.
You might not care about the effects smoking has own your own health, but you cannot deny that tobacco use is harmful.
Actually, in moderate amounts I do just that: moderate smoking (say, 1-2 times per week) will have no overall harmful effect. In fact, the 1964 surgeon general's report on smoking found that pipe smokers live longer than non-smokers (only by about six months, but still...).
As for cigarettes, they used to say that every cigarette takes five minutes off one's life. But if one gets five minutes and one second of enjoyment out of it, isn't it worth it?
Tobacco Reference? Tobacco Reference?!? How many of those earn a mature rating? Sheesh, what's the world coming to when tobacco is demonised as unsuitable for children to see?
I've even heard that the BSA is trying to prevent scoutmasters from smoking near the boys. Because you wouldn't want a role model to be doing something as EEEEEEEEVIL as smoking.
They can have my pipe when they pry it from my cold dead hands. Twits.
Remember folks, outsourcing is good for the economy!
First of all, 'offshore outsourcing'; 'outsourcing' is the practise of hiring an outside firm to manage non-core parts of one's business (e.g. getting a laundry company to take care of one's linens).
Second of all, it's by definition not outsourcing if HP hired new employess (not that there's any indication that they are).
Third, this is one of the very few areas of economics which has been incontrovertibly proven: if regions focus on what they do best, everyone is better off in the long run. In the short run some allowance needs to be made for retooling/retraining/what-have-you, of course.
I don't watch TV (I've neither cable nor an antenna). I get my movies from Netflix. I get my music from the CD store or online (emusic.com is very sweet). And I can build my own box cheaper than I can buy an equivalently-featured one. I'm not too worried.
But the thing is, sometimes the implementer of the library doesn't expose his interface properly. The world's imperfect, and one can't really just use another library instead. If one needs that functionality, then one can't just simply say, 'oh well--I just can't do it.'
Lisp gives you the ability to make an end-run around the encapsulation, but it also makes it obvious (for classes: (slot-value object 'foo) rather than (foo object); for packages package::var rather than package:var)--and many compilers issue warnings. Also, since development is so fast, fixing code which did depend on internal knowledge is generally not a problem if it does come to that.
And since it's been used for some very large systems, I think that it works.
Really, C++ does the same, since members are just slots in a struct, and with a pointer to the struct one can pull anything out one wants *grin*
You oppose killing an infant unless it's mother's life is in danger, but you support killing it to carry out stem cell research? Isn't that a bit inconsistent? Or are you just being clever and referring to the other forms of stem cell research out there (e.g. umbilical and adult)
How can ANYONE *EVER* even begin to think for EVEN JUST A SECOND that he has any idea how hard the decision to hunt down and kill one's spouse's murderer is?
How can ANYONE, who has not ever had a spouse raped and murdered EVER decide what a ANYONE can and cannot do with HIS enemy?
The point is, hunting down and killing one's spouse's murderer is still (legally) murder. And so is killing one's child.
Incidentally, the debate is not about what a woman does with her egg, but rather about what she does to her child: a human being, unlike any ever to live, who is temporarily but utterly dependent on her. The phrase 'fertilised egg' is nonsense: there's an egg, and there's a sperm, and when they unite what results is neither egg nor sperm, by a new human being. Which is kinda cool.
Also incidentally, the brain starts developing at week 3, not in the third trimester. As for having a personality, a newborn doesn't have any personality: it's just a little thing which eats, sleeps and excretes. BUt few other than Singer argue that it should be slain at will.
Well, when one defines a class in Lisp, one defines its members (called slots); each member can take a default value, and can have accessors defined (e.g. so that one can write (foo bar) instead of (slot-value bar 'foo) (you can define either a reader, a writer or an reader/writer). The idea is that if an accessor is defined then it's public; if not it's private. If you need to access the private slot, you can--but if you do, then be prepared!
Lisp takes the same approach with packages. foo:bar indicates the value of foo's exported bar; foo::baz indicates foo's baz, whether or not it was exported. Lisp lets one use encapsulation, but also lets one get around it if necessary. I forget now how doable that is in C++ or Java; Python, of course, pretty much doesn't do the encapsulation thing:-)
I thought that in C++ the owning class had to declare its friends and that any random class or function couldn't declare itself a friend--it's been years, though, so of course I could be wrong. The problem with this is that the owning class might be in a library and doesn't know anything about the code which uses it. Naturally, if I'm wrong and anything can declare itself a friend, then this doesn't matter.
I used to think exactly the same thing about Lisp--my college exposure to it was...less than ideal. It was presented as a theoretically interesting language with little practical use. It seems that a lot of folks had the same experience. While you can program in a functional fashion, Lisp also supports procedural, imperative, object-oriented and structured styles (and probably more). There's even an equivalent to goto:-)
Believe it or not, though, Common Lisp was designed for building extremely large systems. It has everything one would want for that, from low-level stuff like bit vectors and structs on up to packages and the like. The standard library--large for the late 80s/early 90s--could use some expansion, but that goes for C and C++ too:-)
A multi-method is very cool. Most object-oriented languages use a message passing paradigm: a method is a message which is sent to a particular object. obj.method(arg) is really a kind of syntactic sugar for method(obj, arg). Well, in C++, Java, Python or SmallTalk all you can do is specialise method() on its first argument--not on any of the rest (without using method overloading in languages which support it, of course). Lisp is different: methods don't belong to classes, but rather to a generic function, any or all of whose arguments may be specialised for a particular type.
So you can get exactly the same behaviour as a typical message-passing language (by specialising on the first argument), but you can can also do so on any of the other arguments (or not--so you can have catch-all methods too).
One of the nice side-effects of having methods owned by generic functions is that you don't need to worry about which class should own the overloaded method. If you decide to overload method(arg1, arg2, arg3) based on args 1 and 2, where should that definition live: in the class of arg1, in the class of arg2, or elsewhere? With Lisp you can put it anywhere. It's been awhile since I've played with C++ or Java; they may support some way to kinda get this (friend methods?), but it's still not as clean.
In fact, you can define a new method at runtime--and it will be compiled and run as well as one of the original methods.
You can also define special methods to run before, after or around the normal methods, and can specify funky ways in which to combine different methods--there's an awful lot of power available.
Man, can I write! Hope that you're not too bored by now.
Glad you liked my site. I'm certainly no academic! Maybe we can grab a beer sometime. Happy Thursday!
But I wouldn't fault C++ for it's complexity; it's design goal is to be as powerful as possible, within that, it should be as simple as possible. Many fault it's complexity, but I've yet to see anything simpler that retains all the power.
Common Lisp, perhaps? Compiles to tight machine code; doesn't need templates; is object-oriented; possesses multi-methods (which C++ doesn't have); supports multiple inheritance; has a REPL; has full access to the entire language at read time, compile time and run time; it has macros which Don't Suck (and in fact are a valuable part of the language).
I like star trek: TNG. Why? Because, it suggests that sometime in the future, mankind will unite, currency will be replaced by an understanding of needs and a willingness to participate in society, all the earth will stand as one. A place where we explore, not invade, a place where we bring peace, not capitalism to other cultures.
And then the happy bunny fairies come out and sprinkle sugar frosting and sunshine wherever they hop.
That first 'Victorian' in my post should, of course, be 'Elizabethan.' Sigh--see me make the same mistake, although no doubt for different reasons. Double sigh.
Programmers have been called hackers since before there were kids running amok with computers (I won't say before there was computer crime, because I don't know). The term derives either from 'hack writer' or from MIT's tradition of hacking, and the use when applied to computer programmers predates any use when applied to computer miscreants. This is an instance in which ESR is correct, although the battle is almost certainly lost.
How much would you know about the Victorian age if all you ever heard about was the works of Shakespeare and such?
Of course, Shakespeare wrote during the Victorian and early Jacobean eras, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, while the Victorian era was in the late 19th century. You're off by more years than the US has existed:-)
Look at Europe, there are images displayed all over that would certainly be labeled as or near porn here. You don't see the problems, that everyone here expects if the children were exposed.
What?!? As far as this American can tell, just about everything one might expect to result from modern European culture has resulted...
Ummm...of course the military is full of hard drinkers. It's traditional, for Pete's sake! Heck, until the 1970s the Royal Navy still had a daily rum ration for the sailors.
If you were in a high-risk life-or-death profession, wouldn't you want to have a drink or three?
It is 2005. Can someone at gnu write a rename command?
On Fedora, it's part of the util-linux package (which also includes login, so I'm guessing it's pretty basic).
Hi mum, what, you want to install a new email client? yes, apt-get install, but, hang on, yeah, it if gives you anything about dependancies, oh them, yes, they are things that also need to be installed? What? on windows you ust double clicked and pressed next next next next finish, and it was in the startbar and on the desktop?
And in apt-get one would just answer 'yes,' since apt-get figures out all the dependencies anyway; I presume in synaptic one would just click 'yes' or 'next' or whatever. What's the difference?
It's amusing that de Raadt claims that Linux developers are working for big corporations for free, when in fact that's exactly what BSD devs are doing. Under the BSD license, their code can be made proprietary, whereas under the GPL license Linux will always be free.
A Linux developer is paid back by the work of every other developer ever to modify his code; a BSD developer is not: some devs will contribute their code back and some will not.
I noticed that Forbes also had a nasty article about free software in relationship to JBoss and a recent IBM acquisition. Methinks they've bought Microsoft's party line that the BSDL is superior to the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the expense of shorting a stock, it's not generally a very good idea even if one know that said stock will drop over the long haul. Pity, that, 'cause I'd short the hell out of both GOOG and MSFT.
Squeak's cool and all, but last time I looked around I couldn't find a single good online tutorial and reference for its MVC replacement (morphs, I think they're called). There were a few monkey-see, monkey-do tutorials, but nothing that explained the concepts behind morphs, or how to extend them, or how to deliver an application and so forth. It was a real disappointment.
Standard Time is real time. If you really have SAD, you'd be unhappy with or without DST--although you'd probably be happier without it, since the change in day length would be gradual.
DST makes one get up earlier in the summer; it has no effect on winter.
Actually, in moderate amounts I do just that: moderate smoking (say, 1-2 times per week) will have no overall harmful effect. In fact, the 1964 surgeon general's report on smoking found that pipe smokers live longer than non-smokers (only by about six months, but still...).
As for cigarettes, they used to say that every cigarette takes five minutes off one's life. But if one gets five minutes and one second of enjoyment out of it, isn't it worth it?
I've even heard that the BSA is trying to prevent scoutmasters from smoking near the boys. Because you wouldn't want a role model to be doing something as EEEEEEEEVIL as smoking.
They can have my pipe when they pry it from my cold dead hands. Twits.
First of all, 'offshore outsourcing'; 'outsourcing' is the practise of hiring an outside firm to manage non-core parts of one's business (e.g. getting a laundry company to take care of one's linens).
Second of all, it's by definition not outsourcing if HP hired new employess (not that there's any indication that they are).
Third, this is one of the very few areas of economics which has been incontrovertibly proven: if regions focus on what they do best, everyone is better off in the long run. In the short run some allowance needs to be made for retooling/retraining/what-have-you, of course.
I don't watch TV (I've neither cable nor an antenna). I get my movies from Netflix. I get my music from the CD store or online (emusic.com is very sweet). And I can build my own box cheaper than I can buy an equivalently-featured one. I'm not too worried.
Actually, a case can be made that Wilson ratted out his own wife. Whoops.
Lisp gives you the ability to make an end-run around the encapsulation, but it also makes it obvious (for classes: (slot-value object 'foo) rather than (foo object); for packages package::var rather than package:var)--and many compilers issue warnings. Also, since development is so fast, fixing code which did depend on internal knowledge is generally not a problem if it does come to that.
And since it's been used for some very large systems, I think that it works.
Really, C++ does the same, since members are just slots in a struct, and with a pointer to the struct one can pull anything out one wants *grin*
You oppose killing an infant unless it's mother's life is in danger, but you support killing it to carry out stem cell research? Isn't that a bit inconsistent? Or are you just being clever and referring to the other forms of stem cell research out there (e.g. umbilical and adult)
The point is, hunting down and killing one's spouse's murderer is still (legally) murder. And so is killing one's child.
Incidentally, the debate is not about what a woman does with her egg, but rather about what she does to her child: a human being, unlike any ever to live, who is temporarily but utterly dependent on her. The phrase 'fertilised egg' is nonsense: there's an egg, and there's a sperm, and when they unite what results is neither egg nor sperm, by a new human being. Which is kinda cool.
Also incidentally, the brain starts developing at week 3, not in the third trimester. As for having a personality, a newborn doesn't have any personality: it's just a little thing which eats, sleeps and excretes. BUt few other than Singer argue that it should be slain at will.
Lisp takes the same approach with packages. foo:bar indicates the value of foo's exported bar; foo::baz indicates foo's baz, whether or not it was exported. Lisp lets one use encapsulation, but also lets one get around it if necessary. I forget now how doable that is in C++ or Java; Python, of course, pretty much doesn't do the encapsulation thing:-)
I thought that in C++ the owning class had to declare its friends and that any random class or function couldn't declare itself a friend--it's been years, though, so of course I could be wrong. The problem with this is that the owning class might be in a library and doesn't know anything about the code which uses it. Naturally, if I'm wrong and anything can declare itself a friend, then this doesn't matter.
Believe it or not, though, Common Lisp was designed for building extremely large systems. It has everything one would want for that, from low-level stuff like bit vectors and structs on up to packages and the like. The standard library--large for the late 80s/early 90s--could use some expansion, but that goes for C and C++ too:-)
A multi-method is very cool. Most object-oriented languages use a message passing paradigm: a method is a message which is sent to a particular object. obj.method(arg) is really a kind of syntactic sugar for method(obj, arg). Well, in C++, Java, Python or SmallTalk all you can do is specialise method() on its first argument--not on any of the rest (without using method overloading in languages which support it, of course). Lisp is different: methods don't belong to classes, but rather to a generic function, any or all of whose arguments may be specialised for a particular type.
So you can get exactly the same behaviour as a typical message-passing language (by specialising on the first argument), but you can can also do so on any of the other arguments (or not--so you can have catch-all methods too).
One of the nice side-effects of having methods owned by generic functions is that you don't need to worry about which class should own the overloaded method. If you decide to overload method(arg1, arg2, arg3) based on args 1 and 2, where should that definition live: in the class of arg1, in the class of arg2, or elsewhere? With Lisp you can put it anywhere. It's been awhile since I've played with C++ or Java; they may support some way to kinda get this (friend methods?), but it's still not as clean.
In fact, you can define a new method at runtime--and it will be compiled and run as well as one of the original methods.
You can also define special methods to run before, after or around the normal methods, and can specify funky ways in which to combine different methods--there's an awful lot of power available.
Man, can I write! Hope that you're not too bored by now.
Glad you liked my site. I'm certainly no academic! Maybe we can grab a beer sometime. Happy Thursday!
Common Lisp, perhaps? Compiles to tight machine code; doesn't need templates; is object-oriented; possesses multi-methods (which C++ doesn't have); supports multiple inheritance; has a REPL; has full access to the entire language at read time, compile time and run time; it has macros which Don't Suck (and in fact are a valuable part of the language).
And then the happy bunny fairies come out and sprinkle sugar frosting and sunshine wherever they hop.
That first 'Victorian' in my post should, of course, be 'Elizabethan.' Sigh--see me make the same mistake, although no doubt for different reasons. Double sigh.
Programmers have been called hackers since before there were kids running amok with computers (I won't say before there was computer crime, because I don't know). The term derives either from 'hack writer' or from MIT's tradition of hacking, and the use when applied to computer programmers predates any use when applied to computer miscreants. This is an instance in which ESR is correct, although the battle is almost certainly lost.
Of course, Shakespeare wrote during the Victorian and early Jacobean eras, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, while the Victorian era was in the late 19th century. You're off by more years than the US has existed:-)
You do realise that it was the crackers who wanted to be called 'hackers.'
Why? 'Retard' is a perfectly good medical term, as are 'moron,' 'idiot' and 'cretin.' Granted, it's no longer PC.
What?!? As far as this American can tell, just about everything one might expect to result from modern European culture has resulted...
If you were in a high-risk life-or-death profession, wouldn't you want to have a drink or three?
On Fedora, it's part of the util-linux package (which also includes login, so I'm guessing it's pretty basic).
Hi mum, what, you want to install a new email client? yes, apt-get install, but, hang on, yeah, it if gives you anything about dependancies, oh them, yes, they are things that also need to be installed? What? on windows you ust double clicked and pressed next next next next finish, and it was in the startbar and on the desktop?
And in apt-get one would just answer 'yes,' since apt-get figures out all the dependencies anyway; I presume in synaptic one would just click 'yes' or 'next' or whatever. What's the difference?
A Linux developer is paid back by the work of every other developer ever to modify his code; a BSD developer is not: some devs will contribute their code back and some will not.
I noticed that Forbes also had a nasty article about free software in relationship to JBoss and a recent IBM acquisition. Methinks they've bought Microsoft's party line that the BSDL is superior to the GPL.