I actually read a post from the main Matlab guy about one-based arrays once. Basically, his point of view was that mathematics uses one-based matrix notation, and Matlab was intended to solve mathematical problems. That's a different design criteria than programming languages like C and its progeny, which are designed to run fast on a machine.
So, maybe they're both right, though for those of us who do a lot of zero-based programming, it's a bit of a gear shift to do a little Matlab every now and then.
And being one-based isn't the worst of Matlab's sins. It's badly designed up and down the line, except that as a system - that is, a combination of its language, toyboxes, and IDE - it's better for solving certain kinds of problems than anything else out there. So, I depend on it, but I only use it when it's advantages are compelling for what I need to do. [sigh]
Which makes me wonder...is the STL such a mess because Alexander Stepanov didn't understand it? Or was it because he did? Maybe somebody should ask him.
I've had experience working with people remotely, and my experience has been that the problems scale with distance. Specifically, it's easiest to work with someone in your own office, a little harder to work with someone across the hall, harder still to work with someone across the country, and *quite* hard to work with someone across the ocean. By the time you get that far away, timezones become a major problem, and IT systems don't always work well.
From a business point of view, you have to look at the cost versus the benefits. I once worked with a group of people from India who reportedly cost 1/4 of what we cost. But we did some metrics that showed we were 6x as productive, so we actually cost less overall than them. The main reason we were more productive was that our local group was highly experienced in the specialized technology we were developing, whereas the folks in India were brand new to it. Also, the folks in India ran into numerous network and server problems that slowed them down. Evidently, nobody in The Big Corporation realized that they needed to spend money on IT, since this experiment was supposed to be about "cost savings".
Given time, the IT problems might have gotten ironed out, and the Indians might have developed the necessary experience. However, the India group had so much turnover that they never became experienced in that technology as a group. In contrast, we had some Indian folks who worked with us locally, stuck around (at least until they got their Green Cards), and were ultimately as productive as the rest of us.
I recently attended a talk by Joel Spolsky, of "Joel on Software" and "Stack Overflow" fame, who made exactly the same point as TFS. He said they were routinely hiring people to work remotely at Stack Overflow and using remote technology such as Skype in order to get the best and the brightest - presumably also at the best price, though he didn't actually say that. He suggested this as a future trend that companies were eventually going to adapt to.
Ironically, he gave that talk at a company that concentrates as many engineers as possible in one location. Oh, and he gave his talk onsite, not via Skype. Go figure.
I think self-limiting of vocabulary has always been the case in polite society. I assume English is not unique in terms of having a set of taboo words. These words derive their power from their taboo-ness: otherwise, they're just the same as any other word.
When people use these things in a casual way, they dilute their power. It's notable that people who use the F-word regularly have to use it a LOT - just as I saw in "The Interview". They somehow seem to think that repetition brings the word's power back, whereas that only dilutes it further.
There has always been a hierarchy of how taboo each of these words actually is. The F-word is somewhere near the top of the hierarchy, along with the G-word. One word near the bottom is "crap". But I now hear teenagers using that very causually, so perhaps it soon will drop off the list. Or maybe (as they see it) it already has, and I'm just another clueless adult.
I envision a day in which driverless cars are common, and perhaps even in which driver-ful cars are illegal, at least on certain roads. The only possible mistake here is being too early. It's notable, though, that several of the mainstream auto makers (including Nissan and Volvo, IIRC) are now making the same mistake. Perhaps Forbes sees a future in which the horse-and-buggy comes back into style.
Glass has implications for Android, and while it hasn't happened yet for wearables it's pushing the whole industry towards thinking about wearable systems.
Right - I think that's part of what they're after with these things. Google Fiber is another great example. With my local cable company having changed hands several times in the last few years, I find it hard to believe that Google sees Google Fiber as a money-making venture. But by putting in fiber, I think they're trying to jump start a new era in broadband that they think will benefit them in the long run within their primary businesses.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. "It's a mistake to not make immediate profit..." and...they are in it for long term profits. One of the reasons why Google was so successful is that they didn't monetize Google search until they had improved it until almost everyone was using it.
I used to think that too, but in Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, the author presents the story along the lines of "it took them a really long time to figure out how to monitize search."
There might be a common thread between the early days of Google and their current forays into cutting-edge technologies without a proven market, like driverless cars. They seem to have an "if you build it, they will come" mentality. Basically, if they see a technology coming in the future, they jump on it and figure out how to make money on it later. This may partly be rich guys indulging themselves in creating cool new toys, but if their vision is right at least part of the time and they execute well, they'll make money in the long run. Just as they did in search.
Kodak always made cameras, though mainly just to sell film, which was always an enormous cash cow for them. They vigorously pursued the digital camera market but basically lost to Canon, Fuji, and Nikon on some combination of features and price. So, they were doing many of the right things, just not doing them well enough to compete. As you point out, they also probably did some wrong things when they saw that film was dying, but that's just part of the process of reinvention.
If Kodak was once a "film" company, they were really a chemical company, rather than a camera company. In that vein, one of their little-known successes in the reinvention department is their spinoff of Eastman Chemical, which currently is a thriving $11B company.
Coincidentally, the other day I ran into an article called Why I Don't Use Coffeescript that uses the F word repeatedly in an article that doesn't seem to have any need for it. But maybe the author really talks and thinks that way, so it's just natural for him to write stuff (er, sorry, "sh*t") that way.
Maybe people really do talk like that in real life, but I've never met any myself. Anyway, I guess that explains the extensive use of that word here on \., which has puzzled me at times. Every time I see that, I think "Don't they know that they come off as kindda coarse and dumb when they write that?"
Regardless, my original point was that the overuse of any word gets old, in real life and especially in a movie. Along with the F-word, I had cited "like" and "knowwhatimsaying?" as common examples. The latter two get overused in real life more than in movies, but imagine a movie overflowing with either one. Now *that* would be grounds for a cyberattack on a film.
My "less is more" point of view basically comes down to the idea that writing is about communication, and the overuse of any word communicates little. Or, as stated more succinctly in Strunk and White, "Omit needless words." IIRC, in "The Interview", the use of the F-word only conveyed actual information (about the sex act) in a couple of instances. Otherwise, it conveyed the idea that the main characters were kindda coarse and dumb. But that idea got communicated in a matter of seconds. And The Three Stooges managed to convey that idea throughout their entire career without using the F-word once. Clearly, Rogen and Franco are no Three Stooges...
Likewise, the opinions of someone who throws out the baby with the bathwater are wholly irrelevant to me.;-)
Anyway, it sounds like you're from the more-is-more school of the F-word. As someone who is over 17, I don't quite understand that, but to each his own, so... Hmm.
Then there's the matter of lignin. I'm no expert on this, but as I understand it, the plants that eventually became fossil fuel grew during a period in which lignin had been invented by them, but microbes hadn't yet figured out how to break lignin down. So, imagine trees piling up over a long period (millions of years?), not rotting, and their carbon being sequestered. Now, wind things forward a few million years, and imagine that one big-headed creature figures out how to release all that carbon back into the atmosphere, and proceeds to do so over a short period of just a few hundred years. That's gonna have a big impact, and it's going to be irreversible using plants alone.
Human language in general is inconsistent, inefficient, and illogical. It's garbage, but you have to use it to communicate.
"Fascinating, Captain. Are you suggesting that it's inconsistency is integral to its utility? I find that quite illogical."
Spock aside, I happened to catch Martin Freeman, a British actor, on Saturday Night Live last night, and while doing an American accent he accidentally said "leaver" (rhymes with "cleaver") rather than "lever" (rhymes with clever). From the American point of view, the British seem to mispronounce things relative to their spelling, though I suppose the American version of "lever" should be spelled "levver" to get the desired literal effect. I'm sure the British think the same about us. For example, the word "been" is pronounced by the British according to its (it's?) spelling, to rhyme with "seen", whereas Americans say it like "ben", as in the famous founder Franklin and the famous film rat. So, in all fairness, I think both sides make mistakes of pronunciation relative to the spelling of English words, though English is known for its (it's?) non-uniform spelling.
I saw it earlier today via YouTube. It certainly wasn't great, and it can't be compared with classics like "The Great Dictator" or "Duck Soup", but I was surprised how much I liked it. It was much more entertaining than either the trailer or the reviews suggested. The story was reasonably engaging, there were some good gags, the actors weren't bad, and it even had a few points to make. I always count my yawns during a movie, and FWIW, it ended up getting my highest rating of zero yawns - go figure.
My major complaint with it was its near-continuous use of the "F" word. (Sorry to spoil that for those of you who were wondering.) If Seth Rogen and his buddies talk like in real life, maybe they were just being realistic relative to their particular juvenile reality. But the movie would have been better without that.
In the old days, a movie would use just one or two F-words to guarantee an "R" rating, and with the mission accomplished, they'd move on. I seem to remember that one film even cut in an "R" rating notice in the middle of the film just after the first F-word. (Help me out Kids: which movie was that?) And of course, there's the famous South Park episode where the F-word was basically the whole point of the episode. But I don't see any point to it here. Less is more on that, Folks: after one or two F-bombs, it doesn't have any effect and just becomes annoying. (BTW: same goes here.:-) It's like those folks who constantly say "like" or "knowwhatamsayin?" Like, knowwhatamsayin?
Quite right. In summary: none of us here in the peanut gallery have any real way to know who did what. Most of the opinions I've seen here seem to reflect whatever biases each opiner may have. The known facts are few and far between. Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.
This thing is a bit like an Agatha Christie mystery. You may be certain who did it, but you don't really know until Christie tells you. Then you invariably find out you were wrong. Even the strategy of picking the least likely culprit doesn't work. Unfortunately, in this case, we don't have the author to tell us the "truth", so we likely will never know.
I hadn't heard that, though it could be. Your last reference provided an unrelated though quite interesting observation:
What about the open-source movement, which over the past decade has won considerable loyalty and enthusiasm in many programming quarters?
“There’s this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world,” Lanier said. “So what do they make — another version of Unix?”
I've often thought the same thing. I guess "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is OK so long as one replaces the "extinguish" part with "world domination".
Thanks for providing that. I'm reminded of why I didn't get very far reading "The Art (or Act) of Computer Programming": even after faithfully trudging through mounds of Dickensian prose, I still wasn't sure what point Knuth was trying to make.
Just wondering - why is the guy who is known for "The Art of Computer Programming", the seminal work on algorithms, worried about the history of Computer Science?
Either way, I sure am glad he wrote that book. Otherwise, we might not have algorithms to this very day. Fortunately, many other algorithm books have come along to translate Knuth's book from the original Greek.
If the car became a robot then the robot also became a car. Think of it as a really large and heavy fruit fly: it's not too bright, but at least it can reproduce. As a bonus, it also uses energy, though the original car and robot also did that.
Not only do they not crash during particular page generations, but they also may not:
- Suffer from any kinds of code-injection attacks - Return invalid HTML - Contain dead intra-application links - Have mismatches between HTML forms and the fields expected by their handlers - Include client-side code that makes incorrect assumptions about the "AJAX"-style services that the remote web server provides - Attempt invalid SQL queries - Use improper marshaling or unmarshaling in communication with SQL databases or between browsers and web servers
Cures whatever ails ya. Works even better than snake oil! But wait, there's more. For just $19.95, we'll design two new web programming languages. Just pay separate shipping and processing.
BTW, do people still release video games to go with movies? If so, we can look forward to "The Interview" game, coming soon on the PlayStation. Won't it be fun to assassinate a little cartoon Kim when you get to the boss level? He's easy to recognize because he's the only fat person in the whole game.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually read a post from the main Matlab guy about one-based arrays once. Basically, his point of view was that mathematics uses one-based matrix notation, and Matlab was intended to solve mathematical problems. That's a different design criteria than programming languages like C and its progeny, which are designed to run fast on a machine.
So, maybe they're both right, though for those of us who do a lot of zero-based programming, it's a bit of a gear shift to do a little Matlab every now and then.
And being one-based isn't the worst of Matlab's sins. It's badly designed up and down the line, except that as a system - that is, a combination of its language, toyboxes, and IDE - it's better for solving certain kinds of problems than anything else out there. So, I depend on it, but I only use it when it's advantages are compelling for what I need to do. [sigh]
Which makes me wonder...is the STL such a mess because Alexander Stepanov didn't understand it? Or was it because he did? Maybe somebody should ask him.
I've had experience working with people remotely, and my experience has been that the problems scale with distance. Specifically, it's easiest to work with someone in your own office, a little harder to work with someone across the hall, harder still to work with someone across the country, and *quite* hard to work with someone across the ocean. By the time you get that far away, timezones become a major problem, and IT systems don't always work well.
From a business point of view, you have to look at the cost versus the benefits. I once worked with a group of people from India who reportedly cost 1/4 of what we cost. But we did some metrics that showed we were 6x as productive, so we actually cost less overall than them. The main reason we were more productive was that our local group was highly experienced in the specialized technology we were developing, whereas the folks in India were brand new to it. Also, the folks in India ran into numerous network and server problems that slowed them down. Evidently, nobody in The Big Corporation realized that they needed to spend money on IT, since this experiment was supposed to be about "cost savings".
Given time, the IT problems might have gotten ironed out, and the Indians might have developed the necessary experience. However, the India group had so much turnover that they never became experienced in that technology as a group. In contrast, we had some Indian folks who worked with us locally, stuck around (at least until they got their Green Cards), and were ultimately as productive as the rest of us.
I recently attended a talk by Joel Spolsky, of "Joel on Software" and "Stack Overflow" fame, who made exactly the same point as TFS. He said they were routinely hiring people to work remotely at Stack Overflow and using remote technology such as Skype in order to get the best and the brightest - presumably also at the best price, though he didn't actually say that. He suggested this as a future trend that companies were eventually going to adapt to.
Ironically, he gave that talk at a company that concentrates as many engineers as possible in one location. Oh, and he gave his talk onsite, not via Skype. Go figure.
I think self-limiting of vocabulary has always been the case in polite society. I assume English is not unique in terms of having a set of taboo words. These words derive their power from their taboo-ness: otherwise, they're just the same as any other word.
When people use these things in a casual way, they dilute their power. It's notable that people who use the F-word regularly have to use it a LOT - just as I saw in "The Interview". They somehow seem to think that repetition brings the word's power back, whereas that only dilutes it further.
There has always been a hierarchy of how taboo each of these words actually is. The F-word is somewhere near the top of the hierarchy, along with the G-word. One word near the bottom is "crap". But I now hear teenagers using that very causually, so perhaps it soon will drop off the list. Or maybe (as they see it) it already has, and I'm just another clueless adult.
I envision a day in which driverless cars are common, and perhaps even in which driver-ful cars are illegal, at least on certain roads. The only possible mistake here is being too early. It's notable, though, that several of the mainstream auto makers (including Nissan and Volvo, IIRC) are now making the same mistake. Perhaps Forbes sees a future in which the horse-and-buggy comes back into style.
I guess that explains why the paid so much for Nest. I'm still not sure what means that is to what end, but they spent a cool $3.2 billion for it...
Glass has implications for Android, and while it hasn't happened yet for wearables it's pushing the whole industry towards thinking about wearable systems.
Right - I think that's part of what they're after with these things. Google Fiber is another great example. With my local cable company having changed hands several times in the last few years, I find it hard to believe that Google sees Google Fiber as a money-making venture. But by putting in fiber, I think they're trying to jump start a new era in broadband that they think will benefit them in the long run within their primary businesses.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. "It's a mistake to not make immediate profit..." and...they are in it for long term profits. One of the reasons why Google was so successful is that they didn't monetize Google search until they had improved it until almost everyone was using it.
I used to think that too, but in Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, the author presents the story along the lines of "it took them a really long time to figure out how to monitize search."
There might be a common thread between the early days of Google and their current forays into cutting-edge technologies without a proven market, like driverless cars. They seem to have an "if you build it, they will come" mentality. Basically, if they see a technology coming in the future, they jump on it and figure out how to make money on it later. This may partly be rich guys indulging themselves in creating cool new toys, but if their vision is right at least part of the time and they execute well, they'll make money in the long run. Just as they did in search.
Kodak always made cameras, though mainly just to sell film, which was always an enormous cash cow for them. They vigorously pursued the digital camera market but basically lost to Canon, Fuji, and Nikon on some combination of features and price. So, they were doing many of the right things, just not doing them well enough to compete. As you point out, they also probably did some wrong things when they saw that film was dying, but that's just part of the process of reinvention.
If Kodak was once a "film" company, they were really a chemical company, rather than a camera company. In that vein, one of their little-known successes in the reinvention department is their spinoff of Eastman Chemical, which currently is a thriving $11B company.
This syndrome is covered in The Innovator's Dilemma, which reportedly was one of Steve Jobs' favorite books.
Coincidentally, the other day I ran into an article called Why I Don't Use Coffeescript that uses the F word repeatedly in an article that doesn't seem to have any need for it. But maybe the author really talks and thinks that way, so it's just natural for him to write stuff (er, sorry, "sh*t") that way.
Maybe people really do talk like that in real life, but I've never met any myself. Anyway, I guess that explains the extensive use of that word here on \., which has puzzled me at times. Every time I see that, I think "Don't they know that they come off as kindda coarse and dumb when they write that?"
Regardless, my original point was that the overuse of any word gets old, in real life and especially in a movie. Along with the F-word, I had cited "like" and "knowwhatimsaying?" as common examples. The latter two get overused in real life more than in movies, but imagine a movie overflowing with either one. Now *that* would be grounds for a cyberattack on a film.
My "less is more" point of view basically comes down to the idea that writing is about communication, and the overuse of any word communicates little. Or, as stated more succinctly in Strunk and White, "Omit needless words." IIRC, in "The Interview", the use of the F-word only conveyed actual information (about the sex act) in a couple of instances. Otherwise, it conveyed the idea that the main characters were kindda coarse and dumb. But that idea got communicated in a matter of seconds. And The Three Stooges managed to convey that idea throughout their entire career without using the F-word once. Clearly, Rogen and Franco are no Three Stooges...
Likewise, the opinions of someone who throws out the baby with the bathwater are wholly irrelevant to me. ;-)
Anyway, it sounds like you're from the more-is-more school of the F-word. As someone who is over 17, I don't quite understand that, but to each his own, so ... Hmm.
Then there's the matter of lignin. I'm no expert on this, but as I understand it, the plants that eventually became fossil fuel grew during a period in which lignin had been invented by them, but microbes hadn't yet figured out how to break lignin down. So, imagine trees piling up over a long period (millions of years?), not rotting, and their carbon being sequestered. Now, wind things forward a few million years, and imagine that one big-headed creature figures out how to release all that carbon back into the atmosphere, and proceeds to do so over a short period of just a few hundred years. That's gonna have a big impact, and it's going to be irreversible using plants alone.
Human language in general is inconsistent, inefficient, and illogical. It's garbage, but you have to use it to communicate.
"Fascinating, Captain. Are you suggesting that it's inconsistency is integral to its utility? I find that quite illogical."
Spock aside, I happened to catch Martin Freeman, a British actor, on Saturday Night Live last night, and while doing an American accent he accidentally said "leaver" (rhymes with "cleaver") rather than "lever" (rhymes with clever). From the American point of view, the British seem to mispronounce things relative to their spelling, though I suppose the American version of "lever" should be spelled "levver" to get the desired literal effect. I'm sure the British think the same about us. For example, the word "been" is pronounced by the British according to its (it's?) spelling, to rhyme with "seen", whereas Americans say it like "ben", as in the famous founder Franklin and the famous film rat. So, in all fairness, I think both sides make mistakes of pronunciation relative to the spelling of English words, though English is known for its (it's?) non-uniform spelling.
What was the question?
I saw it earlier today via YouTube. It certainly wasn't great, and it can't be compared with classics like "The Great Dictator" or "Duck Soup", but I was surprised how much I liked it. It was much more entertaining than either the trailer or the reviews suggested. The story was reasonably engaging, there were some good gags, the actors weren't bad, and it even had a few points to make. I always count my yawns during a movie, and FWIW, it ended up getting my highest rating of zero yawns - go figure.
My major complaint with it was its near-continuous use of the "F" word. (Sorry to spoil that for those of you who were wondering.) If Seth Rogen and his buddies talk like in real life, maybe they were just being realistic relative to their particular juvenile reality. But the movie would have been better without that.
In the old days, a movie would use just one or two F-words to guarantee an "R" rating, and with the mission accomplished, they'd move on. I seem to remember that one film even cut in an "R" rating notice in the middle of the film just after the first F-word. (Help me out Kids: which movie was that?) And of course, there's the famous South Park episode where the F-word was basically the whole point of the episode. But I don't see any point to it here. Less is more on that, Folks: after one or two F-bombs, it doesn't have any effect and just becomes annoying. (BTW: same goes here. :-) It's like those folks who constantly say "like" or "knowwhatamsayin?" Like, knowwhatamsayin?
Quite right. In summary: none of us here in the peanut gallery have any real way to know who did what. Most of the opinions I've seen here seem to reflect whatever biases each opiner may have. The known facts are few and far between. Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.
This thing is a bit like an Agatha Christie mystery. You may be certain who did it, but you don't really know until Christie tells you. Then you invariably find out you were wrong. Even the strategy of picking the least likely culprit doesn't work. Unfortunately, in this case, we don't have the author to tell us the "truth", so we likely will never know.
I hadn't heard that, though it could be. Your last reference provided an unrelated though quite interesting observation:
What about the open-source movement, which over the past decade has won considerable loyalty and enthusiasm in many programming quarters?
“There’s this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world,” Lanier said. “So what do they make — another version of Unix?”
I've often thought the same thing. I guess "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is OK so long as one replaces the "extinguish" part with "world domination".
Thanks for providing that. I'm reminded of why I didn't get very far reading "The Art (or Act) of Computer Programming": even after faithfully trudging through mounds of Dickensian prose, I still wasn't sure what point Knuth was trying to make.
Just a joke, Son, I say, a joke.
Just wondering - why is the guy who is known for "The Art of Computer Programming", the seminal work on algorithms, worried about the history of Computer Science?
Either way, I sure am glad he wrote that book. Otherwise, we might not have algorithms to this very day. Fortunately, many other algorithm books have come along to translate Knuth's book from the original Greek.
If the car became a robot then the robot also became a car. Think of it as a really large and heavy fruit fly: it's not too bright, but at least it can reproduce. As a bonus, it also uses energy, though the original car and robot also did that.
From TFA:
Not only do they not crash during particular page generations, but they also may not:
- Suffer from any kinds of code-injection attacks
- Return invalid HTML
- Contain dead intra-application links
- Have mismatches between HTML forms and the fields expected by their handlers
- Include client-side code that makes incorrect assumptions about the "AJAX"-style services that the remote web server provides
- Attempt invalid SQL queries
- Use improper marshaling or unmarshaling in communication with SQL databases or between browsers and web servers
Cures whatever ails ya. Works even better than snake oil! But wait, there's more. For just $19.95, we'll design two new web programming languages. Just pay separate shipping and processing.
BTW, do people still release video games to go with movies? If so, we can look forward to "The Interview" game, coming soon on the PlayStation. Won't it be fun to assassinate a little cartoon Kim when you get to the boss level? He's easy to recognize because he's the only fat person in the whole game.