CAD systems: I am not familiar with those, what exactly is too performance-critical for Python in CAD systems?
I know I'm coming into the conversation rather late, but anyway...
I interviewed for a position that partially included maintaining and upgrading the locally-written plugins to some CAD package or another. Basically, the drafters would use the program to design large steel structures, and then they'd use a hodge-podge of Fortran to run stress analysis reports on each item and joint.
I had always assumed that CAD was sort of like a 3D vector drawing program, but I was apparently grossly mistaken.
ACLs are just an attribute of the object. It's really very elegant. For example
You forgot the <smartass> tag. You did mean that sarcastically, didn't you?
I replaced NIS with OpenLDAP on a small network and have a lot of love for it, but your example looked like a Sendmail config file rewritten as APL macros piped through Perl with a couple of trips through Babelfish. That is, I recognized a few words but have no freakin' idea what you were trying to say.
I sincerely hope Netscape provides some good competition to OpenLDAP, because I'd like to think I'll never have to try to understand what you just wrote.
In a world where billions don't have enough to eat, we are now giving our dogs cell phones.
Which is a shame, because that cell phone directly took the food from a photogenic orphan's mouth.
I just bought some grass seed for my lawn - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
I recently paid for another 3 months of DSL service - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
Next week I'll pay my daughter's tuition - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
This morning you logged onto an Internet site to post a lamely trite message with a computer you or your employer bought - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
This is the way of the world. Deal with it.
Similar idea didn't work out
on
Upgrade Your Dog
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· Score: 2, Funny
A friend of mine was visiting his parents' country house and decided to see how his dog would react to a pager. He clipper the pager to the dog's collar and called the number from his cellphone. I don't know if he meant to have it on "vibrate", but the instant result was his 12-year-old hound leaping straight up into the air, spinning around several times really fast, and running into the woods like he had a demonic ferret in hot pursuit.
When Dog came back two hours later, the pager was not to be found. Expensive lesson for all involved.
C is still THE No. 1 language for libraries for use in programs written in lots of different programming languages.
That's why it's particularly nice to see projects breaking away from the "everything in C!" mindset in favor of languages more suited to large-system development. Sure, you can build an entire system on pure C, but you could say the same of any Turing-complete language with an IO library. The question is whether C is the best choice, and it's becoming increasingly clear that the answer is no.
Go Sphinx-4! Don't forget to write Python bindings, OK?
HOW THE HELL DID THIS BEING COME INTO EXISTENCE???
Ever read "Flatland"? To a two-dimensional creature, a 3D world would be unimaginable. Well, "time" is a component dimension of our universe (and one that acts pretty bizarrely at that). Us asking how an entity could exist outside our timeline is pretty analogous to a Flatlander asking how an entity could exist outside his plane.
Note that string theory predicates quite a few "extra" dimensions that we can't directly perceive, so that's not as unimaginable as you might think at first reading.
Even if "insurance premiums can rise to the point where (a) practice is insolvent" that's equally about pricing and collections for services as much as it is expenses.
Sounds good, but wrong. My wife is a podiatrist, which means that the wide majority of her patients are senior citizens and on Medicare. The government decides how much they will pay my wife, regardless of how much she thinks she should charge. So, we're caught in a position where her insurance is going up (although we're lucky - her increase this year was only $6,000) but she has no possible means of increasing her prices.
Some specialties are different, sure, but that doesn't mean that every doctor (or even most of them) get to define their own market.
If the body's immune system is impaired because of HIV infection, aging, malnutrition, or other factors, the TB bacterium may begin to spread more widely in the lungs or to other tissues. TB is seen with increasing frequency among HIV-infected persons. [...] Extrapulmonary TB infections are more common among persons living with HIV.
The grandparent didn't say that people infected with AIDS created TB, but it is reasonable enough to conjecture that if TB is growing more quickly within that population, then they're more likely to have it (and therefore to spread it) than other groups.
It's not a matter of blame, or finger pointing, or name calling, but of fact: TB is coming back with an attitude largely due to its prevalence among people with AIDS. Read the definition of largely before coming up with uncommon counterexamples to "prove" me wrong.
Finally, if you look at the AIDS epidemic strictly as a biology problem, and started aggressively quarantining infected persons back in the '80s, then it would probably no longer exist. I'm not advocating such an action, but while people debate whether it would be morally wrong, you have to admit that it would've worked. Same goes for TB, and I don't think it's wrong to discuss any possible course of action to prevent the further spread. Part of the act of brainstorming is to mention every idea, whether good or bad, and weigh them in order to develop an effective plan. Debate is never a bad thing.
As one who was living in Missouri at the time: GOOD! There was a huge amount of controversy over a judge's ruling to keep polls open three hours later in St. Louis than in the rest of the state. Basically, every other citizen was told that their vote wasn't as important as those from St. Louis. Since that city has a very high concentration of registered Democrats, it's not too surprising that the last-minute vote swung heavily in that direction.
Can you imagine the outcry if Republican strongholds were allowed to keep voting after the Democrat-leaning areas were closed and counted? Yet the reverse is exactly what happened in 2000. Frankly, I'm glad that there will be outside observers monitoring the Missouri elections, because that state can't manage to keep them straight on its own.
Of note, although Bush still won Missouri, that's the election where John Ashcroft lost to the deceased Mel Carnahan by 49% to 51%. It's widely speculated (and believed) that he would have won by a clear margin had St. Louis polls been closed at the same time as the rest of the state. Ironically, had he won, he'd probably still be a senator instead of Attorney General. Guess that one kind of backfired, huh?
The Opteron isn't in the same league as the Itanium, no matter how much AMDroids wish it were.
You're partially correct. The Opteron is far superior to Itanium on a cost-per-performance ratio. How many AMD systems can you build for the same price as one Itanic? Is there any compelling reason so use a single Intel chip over multiple AMDs, either in a cluster or on a multi-processor board?
Given a set budget, I'd be hard pressed to imagine a situation where buying Intel would give you better performance (even in the niche simulation systems) than AMD.
As a footnote, it's somewhat sad to see radical advances in CPUs come to a halt. I'd love to see someone set the industry on its ear.
How 'bout AMD making a 64-bit pure version of the Athlon 64 for entities that have already fully migrated away from 32-bit legacy code? That would get my attention.
In other words: I didn't do anything to any black people, and neither did my family as far back as the 1680s.
OK, I understand what you mean, but I think it's highly unlikely that all of your ancestors are completely free and clear. Given a generous 25-year generation gap, you're talking about maybe 12 generations before you. Assuming that your family tree actually forks, that means you have 2^12 great*10-grandparents (and intermediate descendants) to keep track of.
I haven't done that much research on my own family, and don't know off-hand of anyone non-Mormon who has. I don't think my family ever owned slaves but I wouldn't say it's impossible (or even unlikely). More to the point, noone in my family has owned slaves since it became illegal - of that, I'm sure. That alone is enough to make me dismiss the whole idea.
Or do I get reparations for being 1/16th Souix?
Not a good example. Yes, you probably do, to be honest. I'm reasonably sure that your parent that's 1/8th (unless they were both 1/16) Sioux is "entitled" to something or another.
Mark me down for "flash drive" for the reasons you've given. Also, "keychain drive" implies that mine wouldn't shatter into a million pieces if I applied torque to its little plastic ring. "Pen drive"? I know they make 'em, but I've never actually seen one. "Memory drive" is right out - anything that stores data could reasonably be called "memory", including a spiral notebook.
"Flash drive" isn't perfect because it implies a particular type of memory mechanism, but it's the least bad name I've heard to date.
I think it marks you as part of the "choke me with the digital garrote around my neck until I give you the electronic device containing all my stuff, and here have my iPod too" crowd. Think I'll have to pass on this one.
That seems like a great idea - as long as employers have the right not to hire women of childbearing age who can't prove that they are actively using effective means of birth control. What idiot company would want to pay for a full year of salary without receiving any benefit from work done? What idiot politician would want to sentence his constituents to an economic nightmare and himself to a recall vote and certain ouster?
For being a "Feminist-Mom", you've offered a suggestion more likely to keep married women at home and out of the workplace than anything the wildest chauvanistic imagination could've come up with. How's that for irony?
Sure! Just write a program that halts when it detects unprocessable input, then watch that program to see if it halts. If it works, collect your PhD at the door.
My email address? A real one, even? No problem! Get'cher red hot MP3s from your friendly local root@localhost! I might even reply to emails sent to that address, for a particularly appropriately-scoped definition of "localhost".
I flip a big middle finger to all company owners for being fucking assholes and not giving raises that at least pace with cost of living.
Two things:
If cost of living goes up, then that must mean that every company owner is making a lot more money. They're just being greedy. It couldn't possibly mean that their company's profits are also lower and therefore they have less money to spread around.
If running a lucrative business is so easy, why don't you start one and pay all of your employees out the wazoo?
No. It's completely misleading to say that penicillin has any mentally-induced effects on the cell wall of a pneumococcus. It very well make the patient subjectively feel better in that they know that their disease is being treated, but that has no objective effect whatsoever in the actual physiological healing mechanism.
and lastly, *any* kind of treatment, if it works, should not be discredited for the person using them.. even if it's a minute doasge of a plant that may or may not actually be helping them, even if it doesn't work for everyone..
Yes, it should be loudly and repeatedly discredited. Pain is a legitimate target for non-physiological "treatments", in that much of the subjective experience is due to how the patient expects to feel. A placebo may help a patient expect to feel better and therefore actually make them feel less pain, although recent studies would indicate that this effect is far less powerful than previously thought.
However, there is no "placebo effect" that can counteract infectious agents. People who believe that there is only present a health threat to themselves and those around them. Do you honestly think that Pamela Anderson can really cure her hepatitis with "alternative medicine"? No way! It could (possibly) help her to believe that she should be experience less discomfort from her illness and therefore help her to feel less subjective pain, but that's it - she'll still have a virus chewing through her liver regardless of how spiffy her fake-doctor makes her feel.
BTW, my post and its parent were both modded down -1: Troll until the instant you posted. Thank you for having the courage to change your mind and discuss this instead of hiding behind your previous down-mods.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm coming into the conversation rather late, but anyway...
I interviewed for a position that partially included maintaining and upgrading the locally-written plugins to some CAD package or another. Basically, the drafters would use the program to design large steel structures, and then they'd use a hodge-podge of Fortran to run stress analysis reports on each item and joint.
I had always assumed that CAD was sort of like a 3D vector drawing program, but I was apparently grossly mistaken.
You forgot the <smartass> tag. You did mean that sarcastically, didn't you?
I replaced NIS with OpenLDAP on a small network and have a lot of love for it, but your example looked like a Sendmail config file rewritten as APL macros piped through Perl with a couple of trips through Babelfish. That is, I recognized a few words but have no freakin' idea what you were trying to say.
I sincerely hope Netscape provides some good competition to OpenLDAP, because I'd like to think I'll never have to try to understand what you just wrote.
Which is a shame, because that cell phone directly took the food from a photogenic orphan's mouth.
I just bought some grass seed for my lawn - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
I recently paid for another 3 months of DSL service - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
Next week I'll pay my daughter's tuition - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
This morning you logged onto an Internet site to post a lamely trite message with a computer you or your employer bought - instead of sending the money to a starving kid.
This is the way of the world. Deal with it.
When Dog came back two hours later, the pager was not to be found. Expensive lesson for all involved.
That's why it's particularly nice to see projects breaking away from the "everything in C!" mindset in favor of languages more suited to large-system development. Sure, you can build an entire system on pure C, but you could say the same of any Turing-complete language with an IO library. The question is whether C is the best choice, and it's becoming increasingly clear that the answer is no.
Go Sphinx-4! Don't forget to write Python bindings, OK?
Ever read "Flatland"? To a two-dimensional creature, a 3D world would be unimaginable. Well, "time" is a component dimension of our universe (and one that acts pretty bizarrely at that). Us asking how an entity could exist outside our timeline is pretty analogous to a Flatlander asking how an entity could exist outside his plane.
Note that string theory predicates quite a few "extra" dimensions that we can't directly perceive, so that's not as unimaginable as you might think at first reading.
D'oh! Another stupid Slashdot prejudice busted!
Aight, but get out the checkbook - the little nippers will eat you out of house and home if you're not careful. What time can I drop them off?
"No one expects the Slashdot Effect!"
Sounds good, but wrong. My wife is a podiatrist, which means that the wide majority of her patients are senior citizens and on Medicare. The government decides how much they will pay my wife, regardless of how much she thinks she should charge. So, we're caught in a position where her insurance is going up (although we're lucky - her increase this year was only $6,000) but she has no possible means of increasing her prices.
Some specialties are different, sure, but that doesn't mean that every doctor (or even most of them) get to define their own market.
Because "the Japs" aren't a contagious and deadly disease.
Blaming AIDS sufferers for TB?
Noone said anything about blame, unless you describe all causal relationships you don't like in that way.
From http://www.health-dictionary.com/aids-hiv_term_det ails/Tuberculosis_Tb:
The grandparent didn't say that people infected with AIDS created TB, but it is reasonable enough to conjecture that if TB is growing more quickly within that population, then they're more likely to have it (and therefore to spread it) than other groups.
It's not a matter of blame, or finger pointing, or name calling, but of fact: TB is coming back with an attitude largely due to its prevalence among people with AIDS. Read the definition of largely before coming up with uncommon counterexamples to "prove" me wrong.
Finally, if you look at the AIDS epidemic strictly as a biology problem, and started aggressively quarantining infected persons back in the '80s, then it would probably no longer exist. I'm not advocating such an action, but while people debate whether it would be morally wrong, you have to admit that it would've worked. Same goes for TB, and I don't think it's wrong to discuss any possible course of action to prevent the further spread. Part of the act of brainstorming is to mention every idea, whether good or bad, and weigh them in order to develop an effective plan. Debate is never a bad thing.
Can you imagine the outcry if Republican strongholds were allowed to keep voting after the Democrat-leaning areas were closed and counted? Yet the reverse is exactly what happened in 2000. Frankly, I'm glad that there will be outside observers monitoring the Missouri elections, because that state can't manage to keep them straight on its own.
Of note, although Bush still won Missouri, that's the election where John Ashcroft lost to the deceased Mel Carnahan by 49% to 51%. It's widely speculated (and believed) that he would have won by a clear margin had St. Louis polls been closed at the same time as the rest of the state. Ironically, had he won, he'd probably still be a senator instead of Attorney General. Guess that one kind of backfired, huh?
You're partially correct. The Opteron is far superior to Itanium on a cost-per-performance ratio. How many AMD systems can you build for the same price as one Itanic? Is there any compelling reason so use a single Intel chip over multiple AMDs, either in a cluster or on a multi-processor board?
Given a set budget, I'd be hard pressed to imagine a situation where buying Intel would give you better performance (even in the niche simulation systems) than AMD.
How 'bout AMD making a 64-bit pure version of the Athlon 64 for entities that have already fully migrated away from 32-bit legacy code? That would get my attention.
Oh, I'm with you on that completely - just picking nits.
OK, I understand what you mean, but I think it's highly unlikely that all of your ancestors are completely free and clear. Given a generous 25-year generation gap, you're talking about maybe 12 generations before you. Assuming that your family tree actually forks, that means you have 2^12 great*10-grandparents (and intermediate descendants) to keep track of.
I haven't done that much research on my own family, and don't know off-hand of anyone non-Mormon who has. I don't think my family ever owned slaves but I wouldn't say it's impossible (or even unlikely). More to the point, noone in my family has owned slaves since it became illegal - of that, I'm sure. That alone is enough to make me dismiss the whole idea.
Or do I get reparations for being 1/16th Souix?
Not a good example. Yes, you probably do, to be honest. I'm reasonably sure that your parent that's 1/8th (unless they were both 1/16) Sioux is "entitled" to something or another.
"Flash drive" isn't perfect because it implies a particular type of memory mechanism, but it's the least bad name I've heard to date.
I think it marks you as part of the "choke me with the digital garrote around my neck until I give you the electronic device containing all my stuff, and here have my iPod too" crowd. Think I'll have to pass on this one.
For being a "Feminist-Mom", you've offered a suggestion more likely to keep married women at home and out of the workplace than anything the wildest chauvanistic imagination could've come up with. How's that for irony?
Over 360,000 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, largely to put an end to slavery. How much more can possibly be said?
Sure! Just write a program that halts when it detects unprocessable input, then watch that program to see if it halts. If it works, collect your PhD at the door.
My email address? A real one, even? No problem! Get'cher red hot MP3s from your friendly local root@localhost! I might even reply to emails sent to that address, for a particularly appropriately-scoped definition of "localhost".
Two things:
Yep, that'll work.
No. It's completely misleading to say that penicillin has any mentally-induced effects on the cell wall of a pneumococcus. It very well make the patient subjectively feel better in that they know that their disease is being treated, but that has no objective effect whatsoever in the actual physiological healing mechanism.
and lastly, *any* kind of treatment, if it works, should not be discredited for the person using them.. even if it's a minute doasge of a plant that may or may not actually be helping them, even if it doesn't work for everyone..
Yes, it should be loudly and repeatedly discredited. Pain is a legitimate target for non-physiological "treatments", in that much of the subjective experience is due to how the patient expects to feel. A placebo may help a patient expect to feel better and therefore actually make them feel less pain, although recent studies would indicate that this effect is far less powerful than previously thought.
However, there is no "placebo effect" that can counteract infectious agents. People who believe that there is only present a health threat to themselves and those around them. Do you honestly think that Pamela Anderson can really cure her hepatitis with "alternative medicine"? No way! It could (possibly) help her to believe that she should be experience less discomfort from her illness and therefore help her to feel less subjective pain, but that's it - she'll still have a virus chewing through her liver regardless of how spiffy her fake-doctor makes her feel.
BTW, my post and its parent were both modded down -1: Troll until the instant you posted. Thank you for having the courage to change your mind and discuss this instead of hiding behind your previous down-mods.