Re:Those stats don't really mean much though
on
Mock World Vote
·
· Score: 1
"That's why there is much talk about Kerry's need to focus on a single main issue. "
But Kerry has focused on a single main issue: that he's not George Bush.
The problem with the issue he picked is that, while it does a hell of a job energizing his base, it does nothing to tell moderate swing voters like myself why they should vote for him.
Of course, this all probably stems from the monomaniacal dedication of all of the Democrats during the primary cycle to be "Not Bush".
Different Incentives, Different Results
on
Mock World Vote
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Its amazing the difference between U.S. viewpoint and world viewpoint."
I see no reason that a citizens and residents of foreign countries would vote in our best interest. Maybe they'd vote in their best interest, and maybe their best interest would coincide with ours, but that seems far from likely. It's almost like I decide to give you check rights on my bank accounts. Yeah, you might use those rights to pay my bills for me, but you might equally well use my account to pay your bills. Given human nature, I think that the latter is more likely than the former.
So, the fact that foreign countries concerned about U.S. "dominance" would elect a president going for some kind of vague international consensus before acting doesn't seem like a suprise at all.
"MS hasn't included Basic, Visual or otherwise, with its operating systems since,I dunno, DOS 3.3?"
Sure it has: DOS, through 6.22, included QBasic; Any version of Windows running MSIE (<6-7 years old) includes a copy of both VBScript and JScript. In later versions of Windows with WSH, it's possible to use either of these languages to usefully automate things. The only thing that's really changed is the relative importance of the programming tools in the overall system: When your system's editor is edlin and the only end user application is command.com, gwbasic [1] is a lot more important than it is in, say, Windows XP.
1] I remember Compaq using the BASIC interpreter to write sales demo software for their computers. They even had a little game they wrote, "Compaq Portable", in which the primary goal was to collect as many portable computers you could in 60-seconds.
"people just concentrate on the best tool for the job instead of worrying about things like, "coolness"."
Given that a programming language is the one tool a programmer can't escape, selecting a language that "feels right" is as an important consideration (for the programmer) as any other.
"You wouldn't go into the carpentry business and claim your hammer is the best hammer for every single job would you?"
Nice strawman, but I don't exactly see anybody claiming that their language is the "best for every single job". More likely, they're pointing out specific flaws with Java or comparing it with another, which are common experiences, even in woodworking circles. Just go onto a woodworking newsgroup and ask for advice on the wonderful "tabletop" table saw you're shopping for. You'll rightly be shot down for a whole variety of reasons, and lo, folks will even advocate alternatives.
"Java is slower because it's safer: automatic bounds checking on arrays, which helps to prevent buffer overflow attacks, etc. A program made in Java without an eye to security is going to be more secure than a program made in C without an eye to security. "
The not so funny thing about this is that, as early as 20 years ago, this was true:
Lisp is slower because it's safer: automatic bounds checking on arrays, which helps to prevent buffer overflow attacks, etc. A program made in Lisp without an eye to security is going to be more secure than a program made in C without an eye to security.
One of the major differences is that Lisp allows easy early compilation to optimized native code, whereas Java relies on run time compilation.
"A long-running Java app running under HotSpot will over time grow to be faster than nearly any simmilar C or C++ app. Why? Because the Vm can over time learn how the codepath actually is executing and optimize it at the assembly level. "
You know, profile guided optimization is available for statically compiled languages too. It also has the benefit of working well on apps with short run times where the cost of JIT'ing can't be amortized over long run times. The only real benefit to doing this at run time is to be able to adapt your binary to different CPU architectures on the fly, which simply isn't that common for applications where CPU performance is that critical. For other kinds of hardware specific optimization (disk usage, memory, etc.) HotSpot's level of optimization isn't as important as designing your application right in the first place, when you pick data structures and algorithms, etc.
and that is assuming you already know in advance exactly how the program will be used so you know what paths to optimize. This is highly unlikely.
For a truly performance intensive application, a good programmer will use a profiler and a decent suite of test data. If you really don't know what paths to optimize, then you're way too far gone to be saved by HotSpot optimizations at run time.
Java needs a VM so you can't run it everywhere - THis has to be the dumbest one of all.
But not solely for the reason you state. There are some ways to compile Java to native code that are good enough to run Eclipse.
To cut a short story shorter, he got selected after a technical and HR interviews which were cakewalks compared to other guys' interviews.
To be frank, it really concerns me when the interview process is a "cakewalk". It generally means that the interviewer is too lazy, thoughtless, or inexperienced to come up with challenging questions. If a company takes that attitude towards their most important fundamental activity (bringing in talent), it doesn't bode well for anything else they do. (Plus, I like working with people that can teach me things...)
ObJava: I've seen some _tough_ Java interviews, so Java doesn't necessarily mean anything about the difficulty of the interview process.
"Java is now frequently used in CS research as well. It looks almost certain that the next milestone in CS evolution will come in the form of Aspect Oriented Programming and AspectJ has been the leading implementation. "
Ironically enough, AspectJ is heavily based on the Lisp/CLOS Metaobject protocol that dates back to the late 80's and early 90's. Not that this should suprise anyone, the same folks developed both tools. I'd characterize AspectJ as more an "industrial response" to CLOS/MOP than new research.
I'd try a couple things. Given that you have a Kinesis keyboard, if you have the Ergo (split, dished) keyboard, you can try putting one of the smaller Cirque touchpads between the two halves of the keyboard. That elimininates reaching over to the side to use the mouse (very important, see below), and also lets you use a different set of muscles to do your pointing.
Another option is to try a trackball. I have a microsoft Trackball explorer optical (think I got the name right), and that did my index fingers absolute wonders, since the trackball lets you click with the thumb (much stronger, etc.) The one problem with this is that you still end up reaching over to the side to use the pointing device. Hold that position too long, and you can end up with an overall postural imbalance since tendons and muscles get exercised unevenly on the two sides of your body. Therefore, I'd also reccomend periodically switching the side of the keyboard the trackball is on. The best trackball with which to do this are some of the Kensington models that are symmetrical about their axis, although Microsoft's trackball supposedly allows you to assign left and right click actions to buttons on the right side of their trackballs.
Other than that, be sure to take breaks often, probably more often than feels natural. If you're like me, it's way, way too easy to postpone or forget about the breaks you need to take to stay healthy. A wonderful tool, workrave is a free, open source, tool that enforces breaks and pauses on Windows and Linux machines. Use it, live by it, and it will help too.
I'd also reccomend that you get in shape. Exercise and stretching can also help a great deal, and your primary form of exercise should not be holding yourself off to the side to manipulate the mouse.
Excel also has (had? this might be fixed in 2003) some problems with things like standard deviations, etc. Run a standard deviation of 666666666123, 666666666246, and 666666666369, and you won't get the expected value of 123. Rather, you'll get 0. The high absolute values of the three numbers causes rounding problems by pushing significant bits out of the mantissa of IEEE numbers.
Despite the fact that this has an easy fix (mean center the data before computing the deviation), Excel has had this problem for years.
Just to be pedantic, there was no Windows GDI 20 years ago. Hell, the Mac had just been born.,
Okay... I rounded.
The actual release date of Windows 1.0 is November 20, 1985, which would make it a little more than 18 years.
Or course, the OP might be saying that the basics are "no stable graphics platform"....
Yeah, my experience has been the the GDI is a pain in the ass to use. And now that I think of it more closely, the original poster has a point. I have a shipping application that uses offscreen bitmaps to handle display updates. Thanks to a difference in the Win9X codebase and the NT codebase, it fails on 9X...
X is not big & slow -- this is a common misconception. X can run acceptably on iPAQs, Zauruses, and other very memory- & CPU-limited devices.
And the old 386/486 machines that were common when XFree86/X386 were developed.
My first X11 box was a 486/33 with 8MB of RAM. I ran twm and later fvwm as my window managers of choice, and it actually ran pretty well. Of course, running both Emacs and GCC with the X Server was a little dicey, but it was entirely acceptable.
If modern X Windows installations have more overhead, a lot of it is due to the fact that we're running higher color depths, keeping a lot of bitmaps around (themes, etc.) and running environments like KDE and Gnome. X itself isn't the root cause.
Windows GDI seems to change whenever the wind blows.
The Windows GDI is actually pretty stable. Features have been added, but the basics are fundamentally the same as they were 20 years ago.
Now, GDI+ is a new API that adds a bunch of needed capabilities. For some reason, it is being replaced, but that's happening in Longhorn circa 2005-2007. Even then, GDI and GDI+ applications will still work and be supported.
I've done a fair bit with siod lately, and can say that while it's not the most sophisticated scheme interpreter around, it dovetails very nicely with C code. It's trivial to write new functions, and defining new data types isn't that much more difficult at all.
That's as close to Lisp macros as you can get.
For people looking for Lisp-style macros, siod includes a simple implementation of a feature that works very much like macros. If the symbol in the function spot of a list itself refers to a symbol, the referred to symbol's binding is evaluated as a macro rewriting function.
Oh, and as an example of its simplicity, the whole thing fits in something like 10,000 lines of code. That's garbage collection, a library of simple string functions, a Scheme evaluator, file I/O, and a bunch of stuff I'm probably forgetting...
IIRC, SCM and Guile are both derivations of the original siod code base. For that matter, so is STk, as it it itself based on SCM. Either of those would likely be a good choice too.
Running at 5-7GHz is absolutely retarded for a processor to do.
A big chunk of the Pentium 4 already runs at twice the rated clock rate. In other words, there are parts of the P4-2.4GHz on my desktop that are running at 4.8Ghz.
There is some speculation on the net that Intel is basically going to start using this higher clock rate as the clock speed in their marketing literature. The idea is that enhancements to the hyper-threading technology to be released in Prescott will give a significant enough jump in performance to allow the marketing people to justify the sudden x2 in published clock rate.
As a side note, they also speak towards how next generation these chips might run 64-bit code, a la x86-64. Apparantly, there's reason to believe that the Prescott die has ALU's and support for 64-bit x86 code already on board. Nothing is said about piggybacking a second chip...
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
And the easter bunny would hop around laying chocolate eggs.
In the case of 3rd world countries, pollution controls would most likely harm their developing economies. Any far reaching mandate would only serve to keep them less-developed, less large amounts of 1st world financial intervention. Without some way to prevent misuse of funds by corrupt or incompetant governments, that kind of intervention seems difficult to justify.
In the case of technophobic people, you're making the assumption that people are generally intelligent, informed, empowered, and willing to act in society's best interest over their own. Wake up, look around, and tell me if the people (and companies) you see on a daily basis meet these criteria sufficiently to make the conclusion you advocate stick. Even if the electorate was so ideal, there are real risks to nuclear power that the anti-Nuke people aren't so wrong about, and the choice might not be so obvious.
Sadly, this easter bunny is laying something else...
The Macsyma company has gone out of business, but there's a good free (open source) version known as Maxima.
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/maxima.html
A very sad side note to this is that the individual largely responsible for spearheading this piece of work, William Schelter, has recently passed away. He was also the maintainer of GNU Common Lisp. Rest In Peace.
Something I've wondered about, along these lines, is scanning documents (bills, etc.) into a computer as they're received. From that point, the paper copy could be thrown away if the electronic copy was sufficiently 'official'. It seems like the electronic documents would also be a lot easier to organize, sort, and retain. Possible legal issues have kept me from doing so.
IBM tried something like this with the original PCjr. It was housed in a relatively small form factor case with a plug in the side. 'Slices' for various peripheral devices (memory, serial port, etc.) plugged into the side for expansion.
Amen. 'Name the damn [sic] SQL dolphin' gets a front page spot and ~350 comments while Knuth languishes in the back with what, twelve? I haven't questioned slashdot through all the reposts and poorly researched posts, but this is getting ridiculous. If this keeps up, slashdot will become the 'Entertainment Tonight' of the tech community.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's why there is much talk about Kerry's need to focus on a single main issue. "
But Kerry has focused on a single main issue: that he's not George Bush.
The problem with the issue he picked is that, while it does a hell of a job energizing his base, it does nothing to tell moderate swing voters like myself why they should vote for him.
Of course, this all probably stems from the monomaniacal dedication of all of the Democrats during the primary cycle to be "Not Bush".
"Its amazing the difference between U.S. viewpoint and world viewpoint."
I see no reason that a citizens and residents of foreign countries would vote in our best interest. Maybe they'd vote in their best interest, and maybe their best interest would coincide with ours, but that seems far from likely. It's almost like I decide to give you check rights on my bank accounts. Yeah, you might use those rights to pay my bills for me, but you might equally well use my account to pay your bills. Given human nature, I think that the latter is more likely than the former.
So, the fact that foreign countries concerned about U.S. "dominance" would elect a president going for some kind of vague international consensus before acting doesn't seem like a suprise at all.
"MS hasn't included Basic, Visual or otherwise, with its operating systems since,I dunno, DOS 3.3?"
Sure it has: DOS, through 6.22, included QBasic; Any version of Windows running MSIE (<6-7 years old) includes a copy of both VBScript and JScript. In later versions of Windows with WSH, it's possible to use either of these languages to usefully automate things. The only thing that's really changed is the relative importance of the programming tools in the overall system: When your system's editor is edlin and the only end user application is command.com, gwbasic [1] is a lot more important than it is in, say, Windows XP.
1] I remember Compaq using the BASIC interpreter to write sales demo software for their computers. They even had a little game they wrote, "Compaq Portable", in which the primary goal was to collect as many portable computers you could in 60-seconds.
"people just concentrate on the best tool for the job instead of worrying about things like, "coolness"."
Given that a programming language is the one tool a programmer can't escape, selecting a language that "feels right" is as an important consideration (for the programmer) as any other.
"You wouldn't go into the carpentry business and claim your hammer is the best hammer for every single job would you?"
Nice strawman, but I don't exactly see anybody claiming that their language is the "best for every single job". More likely, they're pointing out specific flaws with Java or comparing it with another, which are common experiences, even in woodworking circles. Just go onto a woodworking newsgroup and ask for advice on the wonderful "tabletop" table saw you're shopping for. You'll rightly be shot down for a whole variety of reasons, and lo, folks will even advocate alternatives.
"Java is slower because it's safer: automatic bounds checking on arrays, which helps to prevent buffer overflow attacks, etc. A program made in Java without an eye to security is going to be more secure than a program made in C without an eye to security. "
The not so funny thing about this is that, as early as 20 years ago, this was true:
Lisp is slower because it's safer: automatic bounds checking on arrays, which helps to prevent buffer overflow attacks, etc. A program made in Lisp without an eye to security is going to be more secure than a program made in C without an eye to security.
One of the major differences is that Lisp allows easy early compilation to optimized native code, whereas Java relies on run time compilation.
"A long-running Java app running under HotSpot will over time grow to be faster than nearly any simmilar C or C++ app. Why? Because the Vm can over time learn how the codepath actually is executing and optimize it at the assembly level. "
You know, profile guided optimization is available for statically compiled languages too. It also has the benefit of working well on apps with short run times where the cost of JIT'ing can't be amortized over long run times. The only real benefit to doing this at run time is to be able to adapt your binary to different CPU architectures on the fly, which simply isn't that common for applications where CPU performance is that critical. For other kinds of hardware specific optimization (disk usage, memory, etc.) HotSpot's level of optimization isn't as important as designing your application right in the first place, when you pick data structures and algorithms, etc.
and that is assuming you already know in advance exactly how the program will be used so you know what paths to optimize. This is highly unlikely.
For a truly performance intensive application, a good programmer will use a profiler and a decent suite of test data. If you really don't know what paths to optimize, then you're way too far gone to be saved by HotSpot optimizations at run time.
Java needs a VM so you can't run it everywhere - THis has to be the dumbest one of all.
But not solely for the reason you state. There are some ways to compile Java to native code that are good enough to run Eclipse.
To cut a short story shorter, he got selected after a technical and HR interviews which were cakewalks compared to other guys' interviews.
To be frank, it really concerns me when the interview process is a "cakewalk". It generally means that the interviewer is too lazy, thoughtless, or inexperienced to come up with challenging questions. If a company takes that attitude towards their most important fundamental activity (bringing in talent), it doesn't bode well for anything else they do. (Plus, I like working with people that can teach me things...) ObJava: I've seen some _tough_ Java interviews, so Java doesn't necessarily mean anything about the difficulty of the interview process.
"Java is now frequently used in CS research as well. It looks almost certain that the next milestone in CS evolution will come in the form of Aspect Oriented Programming and AspectJ has been the leading implementation. "
Ironically enough, AspectJ is heavily based on the Lisp/CLOS Metaobject protocol that dates back to the late 80's and early 90's. Not that this should suprise anyone, the same folks developed both tools. I'd characterize AspectJ as more an "industrial response" to CLOS/MOP than new research.
I'd try a couple things. Given that you have a Kinesis keyboard, if you have the Ergo (split, dished) keyboard, you can try putting one of the smaller Cirque touchpads between the two halves of the keyboard. That elimininates reaching over to the side to use the mouse (very important, see below), and also lets you use a different set of muscles to do your pointing.
Another option is to try a trackball. I have a microsoft Trackball explorer optical (think I got the name right), and that did my index fingers absolute wonders, since the trackball lets you click with the thumb (much stronger, etc.) The one problem with this is that you still end up reaching over to the side to use the pointing device. Hold that position too long, and you can end up with an overall postural imbalance since tendons and muscles get exercised unevenly on the two sides of your body. Therefore, I'd also reccomend periodically switching the side of the keyboard the trackball is on. The best trackball with which to do this are some of the Kensington models that are symmetrical about their axis, although Microsoft's trackball supposedly allows you to assign left and right click actions to buttons on the right side of their trackballs.
Other than that, be sure to take breaks often, probably more often than feels natural. If you're like me, it's way, way too easy to postpone or forget about the breaks you need to take to stay healthy. A wonderful tool, workrave is a free, open source, tool that enforces breaks and pauses on Windows and Linux machines. Use it, live by it, and it will help too.
I'd also reccomend that you get in shape. Exercise and stretching can also help a great deal, and your primary form of exercise should not be holding yourself off to the side to manipulate the mouse.
Excel also has (had? this might be fixed in 2003) some problems with things like standard deviations, etc. Run a standard deviation of 666666666123, 666666666246, and 666666666369, and you won't get the expected value of 123. Rather, you'll get 0. The high absolute values of the three numbers causes rounding problems by pushing significant bits out of the mantissa of IEEE numbers.
Despite the fact that this has an easy fix (mean center the data before computing the deviation), Excel has had this problem for years.
Just to be pedantic, there was no Windows GDI 20 years ago. Hell, the Mac had just been born.,
Okay... I rounded.
The actual release date of Windows 1.0 is November 20, 1985, which would make it a little more than 18 years.
Or course, the OP might be saying that the basics are "no stable graphics platform"....
Yeah, my experience has been the the GDI is a pain in the ass to use. And now that I think of it more closely, the original poster has a point. I have a shipping application that uses offscreen bitmaps to handle display updates. Thanks to a difference in the Win9X codebase and the NT codebase, it fails on 9X...
X is not big & slow -- this is a common misconception. X can run acceptably on iPAQs, Zauruses, and other very memory- & CPU-limited devices.
And the old 386/486 machines that were common when XFree86/X386 were developed.
My first X11 box was a 486/33 with 8MB of RAM. I ran twm and later fvwm as my window managers of choice, and it actually ran pretty well. Of course, running both Emacs and GCC with the X Server was a little dicey, but it was entirely acceptable.
If modern X Windows installations have more overhead, a lot of it is due to the fact that we're running higher color depths, keeping a lot of bitmaps around (themes, etc.) and running environments like KDE and Gnome. X itself isn't the root cause.
Windows GDI seems to change whenever the wind blows.
The Windows GDI is actually pretty stable. Features have been added, but the basics are fundamentally the same as they were 20 years ago.
Now, GDI+ is a new API that adds a bunch of needed capabilities. For some reason, it is being replaced, but that's happening in Longhorn circa 2005-2007. Even then, GDI and GDI+ applications will still work and be supported.
Parent is underrated... the slashdot story it links to contains useful information.
Yes, maxima...
s h.html
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
or giac...
http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~parisse/engli
(giac, interestingly enough, runs on PDA's for a mobile solution...)
If you haven't found open source CAS, you haven't really looked...
I'd reccomend siod, or perhaps guile.
http://people.delphiforums.com/gjc/siod.html
I've done a fair bit with siod lately, and can say that while it's not the most sophisticated scheme interpreter around, it dovetails very nicely with C code. It's trivial to write new functions, and defining new data types isn't that much more difficult at all.
That's as close to Lisp macros as you can get.
For people looking for Lisp-style macros, siod includes a simple implementation of a feature that works very much like macros. If the symbol in the function spot of a list itself refers to a symbol, the referred to symbol's binding is evaluated as a macro rewriting function.
Oh, and as an example of its simplicity, the whole thing fits in something like 10,000 lines of code. That's garbage collection, a library of simple string functions, a Scheme evaluator, file I/O, and a bunch of stuff I'm probably forgetting...
IIRC, SCM and Guile are both derivations of the original siod code base. For that matter, so is STk, as it it itself based on SCM. Either of those would likely be a good choice too.
Anybody have any experiences, good or bad, with General Employment?
No idea why you were dinged during moderation, but that'a good point. At any rate, the ALU's should still be double pumped.
Running at 5-7GHz is absolutely retarded for a processor to do.
A big chunk of the Pentium 4 already runs at twice the rated clock rate. In other words, there are parts of the P4-2.4GHz on my desktop that are running at 4.8Ghz.
There is some speculation on the net that Intel is basically going to start using this higher clock rate as the clock speed in their marketing literature. The idea is that enhancements to the hyper-threading technology to be released in Prescott will give a significant enough jump in performance to allow the marketing people to justify the sudden x2 in published clock rate.
There is a lot of speculation and analysis done at this site http://www.chip-architect.com/.
As a side note, they also speak towards how next generation these chips might run 64-bit code, a la x86-64. Apparantly, there's reason to believe that the Prescott die has ALU's and support for 64-bit x86 code already on board. Nothing is said about piggybacking a second chip...
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
And the easter bunny would hop around laying chocolate eggs.
In the case of 3rd world countries, pollution controls would most likely harm their developing economies. Any far reaching mandate would only serve to keep them less-developed, less large amounts of 1st world financial intervention. Without some way to prevent misuse of funds by corrupt or incompetant governments, that kind of intervention seems difficult to justify.
In the case of technophobic people, you're making the assumption that people are generally intelligent, informed, empowered, and willing to act in society's best interest over their own. Wake up, look around, and tell me if the people (and companies) you see on a daily basis meet these criteria sufficiently to make the conclusion you advocate stick. Even if the electorate was so ideal, there are real risks to nuclear power that the anti-Nuke people aren't so wrong about, and the choice might not be so obvious.
Sadly, this easter bunny is laying something else...
-Mike
The Macsyma company has gone out of business, but there's a good free (open source) version known as Maxima.
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/wfs/maxima.html
A very sad side note to this is that the individual largely responsible for spearheading this piece of work, William Schelter, has recently passed away. He was also the maintainer of GNU Common Lisp. Rest In Peace.
-Mike
Something I've wondered about, along these lines, is scanning documents (bills, etc.) into a computer as they're received. From that point, the paper copy could be thrown away if the electronic copy was sufficiently 'official'. It seems like the electronic documents would also be a lot easier to organize, sort, and retain. Possible legal issues have kept me from doing so.
-Mike
IBM tried something like this with the original PCjr. It was housed in a relatively small form factor case with a plug in the side. 'Slices' for various peripheral devices (memory, serial port, etc.) plugged into the side for expansion.
-Mike
Amen. 'Name the damn [sic] SQL dolphin' gets a front page spot and ~350 comments while Knuth languishes in the back with what, twelve? I haven't questioned slashdot through all the reposts and poorly researched posts, but this is getting ridiculous. If this keeps up, slashdot will become the 'Entertainment Tonight' of the tech community.
-Mike
COM has a similar capability: OLE Structured Storage. With the right set of conventions, what you describe is quite possible to implement.
h tm
http://www.desaware.com/OleStructuredStorageL3.