I mean, the guy was describing the sound of a pipe organ for two pages
And, did you READ those two pages? I did, and I not only learned quite a bit, but I found myself wanting to learn more!
I hate reading this kind of thing because it reminds me that we're now in the anti-erudite phase of American history. This happens periodically in most societies, and it's not surprising, but that doesn't mean I'm not saddened by it. Was a time that a guy writing a book, and spending two well-researched pages on a topic as obscure as how a pipe organ works would be welcomed and enjoyed for what it is, but now we have to slap the guy down for -- and I'm not making this up, it's a quote from the OP -- being "the literary equivalent of a nerdy kid who won't shut up about how smart he is."
It's not like Stephenson says, "hey, I'm smart, wanna see? huh? huh? huh?" No, he just writes about a wide range of technical and social issues, layering them with the fruits of his research.
Now, you want to talk about structure, we can get into that. I think his structure sucks, especially his endings. But, I put up with that because a) he has great ideas b) his characters react to those great ideas in interesting ways and c) I come out of one of his books knowing more, and having thought more about what I did know, than I did going in. Is that an unreasonable reaction to a good book?
If Stephenson an, say, Banks (or any other writer who can mold a storyline around a story without leaving stretch-marks) ever collaborated the result would be quite interesting to watch.
I keep pointing this out on Slashdot, and for some reason people keep missing it: What comes out of the Linux Kernel Developers is a development release. Just like any development release structure of sufficient size, they have several working branches and several stable branches, but that doesn't mean that what you get from a "stable branch" is a valid production release.
When a vendor releases a Linux system, I expect their kernel to be a valid production release. That is, they are going to support that release for some specified period of time, and it's not going to change in incompatible ways. Take a look at the history of 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and you'll see large numbers of incompatible changes (scheduling, filesystems, etc.), but they're compatible changes FROM THE DEVELOPER'S STANDPOINT. They don't change API's, but they might make your production installation behave radically differently.
I expect, e.g., Red Hat to release a 2.2.x kernel and continue to support it by back-porting security updates and critical bug-fixes, but otherwise LEAVE IT ALONE. They've not always done this, and part of that is that Linux is still in the late stages of an early adopter market (i.e. the market size is still growing in a logarithmic pattern). I can understand that, but in the future, I expect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 20.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 20.45 to differ very slightly, and possibly be separated by 5 or 10 YEARS. That leaves no room for kernel-of-the-year upgrades.
So, back to the point: backports are fine, as long as it's the developers doing the backporting. If vendors start picking up those backports just because they can, I have a problem with that. I also have a problem with a vendor that releases a kernel version that has been out less than a year....
Additionally, since it's the only entry on the above list that is missing or has limited support for transactions
Just flat-out untrue.
I know - you can get it with its slower innodb file system now
Actually, Berkeley DB and InnoDB both support transactions, but InnoDB is more complete, which is also (of course) why it is slower. In order to do propper transactional support, you have to inject a lot of overhead, and that's why MySQL has always been blazingly fast.
The great part is that you can still fall back on the MyISAM table type (which implements everything you need in terms of atomic inserts and updates, as long as that atomicity is not required across several statements) if you want that speed, because MySQL is modular enough to support that. Imagine that, a modular database... who'da thunk.
views
The lack of views is directly related to the lack of sub-queries, which is being addressed, but is still a questionable feature. Ultimately, I've never seen a query that used a sub-query that didn't actually need to be optimized through judicious uses of de-normalization. Views are just a hard-coded sub-query, and as such give tremendous flexibility to the programmer, but are nearly impossible to correctly optimize, and the performance bottlenecks aren't always obvious on the first pass.
Once sub-queries and views appear, I would still caution STRONGLY against their use.
So, if the non-ansi syntax isn't a big enough pain-in-the-butt
Well, that's really not fair. The syntax is no more deviant from ANSI than, say, Oracle or Sybase, but those databases' extensions have become so widly accepted that we don't think about how non-ANSI they are anymore.
Granted there are a few places (especially in the types arena) where MySQL does not yet implement some ANSI features, but I've never run into a significant problems in those regards. My applications port fairly cleanly when I want them to, but in many cases, I've choses in the architecture to rely on some key features of MySQL that aren't standard, and I've benefitted greatly from having done so. Sure, I could port to something else later, if I had to, but it would be a pain, and I'd lose functionality.
I suppose much of this will improve over time as they rewrite their engine to include more and more of that functionality that nobody wants
It's not that nobody wants it, it's that most of the people who want it aren't actually providing reasons as such. They are just whining about x, y or z metric to which their pet database conforms, and MySQL doesn't. That game is not interesting. Transactions were required for certain applications, so they were added. Sub-queries less so, and so they will be added, but much slower. Things like full ANSI type compatibility are required only if a) you don't use an ODBC layer that translates types for you or b) you want to just take your native SQLServer app and re-point it to a MySQL database.
Stored procedures and other similar features are just bloat, and gain you no real advantage (other than making a bridge between languages, which is the wrong place to solve that problem... after all it doesn't help you with your network protocols...).
The bottom line is that MySQL is a fairly low-level database. If you want something higher level, cool, go for it. But, in programming langauges you don't say "C is useless because it doesn't have all of the features of ADA", you just use the right tool for the job. Why is this so different?
I disagree. Any language which removes basic assumptions made by lower-level languages (e.g. that my int won't become a string when I'm not looking) will "slow" the language.
Perl 1..6 makes many tradeoffs which require that it be slower in execution than, for example, C. But that's not all bad. It gives you a level of semantic flexability that you don't have in those lower level languages. Granted, you pay for it, but I think the price is worth it.
As an example of what I mean
my int $x=1; my int $y=2; my int $z = $x + $y;
What's the result? In your model, we would agree that the reuslt must be an integer, and specifically 1, but that's (woefully), not the case. You can't know that another thread hasn't womped the contents of $x and replaced it with a high level object that is "sort of 1" by the time the third statement executes. Worse,
my int $x = foo(); my int $y = bar(); my int $z = $x + $y;
Here, we don't even know if we're dealing with integer addition! If $x is a URI, then hold on to your seat and enjoy the ride, but you're not going to be sure of the result.
"Disney would likely have tons of material to work with if stories from the first half of this century"
Ahem. I take your meaning, but you do realize we rolled the clocks forward a century, right?;-)
Yeah, Disney is cutting off their nose to spite their face here. It's a bad call on the part of an organization whose core competence revolves around turning tired genres into enjoyable kids stories.
More importantly, this change in the way people listen to music signals a change in the way people are treating music. It's not very much like radio (jokes about modern stations' short playlists not withstanding). I want to listen to something that will NOT be the focus of my attention, but rather a mood setter.
Given that, is it any shock that you not only don't care about the artist's intended progression for the album, but actively don't want it grabbing at your attention for an hour or more?
Overlap between an animated show and live-action can be fairly workable. The animated show can, to some extent, work around time constraints (as long as they are relatively fixed) because taping of the voices happens separately. Thus, she could tape her voice on Tuesday and everyone else could tape on Wednesday, and that would be fine.
Of course, that's just an example, and it depends on how good her agent is.
Hey, watch it! A lot of ducks (sorry, waddling-challenged flight-enhanced avians) are quite sensitive about their facial features! They prefer the term "facial extension".
Yeah, tools like this are excellent. In the astro community, they use a tool called IDL (interactive data language, I think?) which is similar. High level constructs, with lots of big primatives to get you very fast computation.
Perl has an excellent tool called PDL that does roughly the same thing, and is used by the Perl/Gimp interface, yeilding some wonderful possibilities.
That said, Java was the right choice for this. Java may have poor systems integration and a host of issues that arise from that (i.e. Java's platform agnosticism, which actually turns into a sort of single-platform dependence on itself with little or no integration with its actual platform), but when it comes to handing thousands of people a program that is going to run mathematical calculations EXACTLY THE SAME WAY on every machine, Java has Python, Perl, Ruby, C# and a host of other high level languages beat because it allows you to enforce very specific constraints on how the math will be done. All of the others just provide you with varying degrees of abstraction on top of your native execution models.
Once Parrot is done, I suspect that more languages, ported to run on top of Parrot, will also offer these constraints as optional features, but time will tell.
Having thought about this for a bit, I change my mind.
Both is good.
The result table looks like this
whitelist
yes no
b l y a e spam spam c s k l n i o not spam unknown s t
Having the whitelist does get you one extra bit of info, so it's useful insofar as it goes. In a system like SpamAssassin, you score high for "spam" results, a small negative for "not spam" results and zero for "unknown".
You're missing the point. There's no outsourcing here. VA was (as a great many others have been) a retail outlet for foreign computers. They weren't outsourcing anyting.
I have no problem with foreign products per se. Heck, I go to work in a Nissan, so I'd be pretty hypocritical if I said I did.
On the other hand, many of the companies on that list have unloaded their people during a bad economy with no respect for how increadibly hard it will be to find work, only to turn around and hire people overseas for a fraction of the cost. That's just plain wrong.
Not only is it both, but the suck factor seems to be heavily in the whitelist camp.
Take for example the spammer who wants to get his spam through to me. He peppers his document with HREFs to Yahoo!, Hotmail, CNN.com, NASA.gov and a dozen or so other sites that are likely in the whitelist.
Now I look at it and he manages to squeek by the initial origin lookup (e.g. he would have passed through traditional RBLs) and body check finds that *most* of the entires in the body are good sites, and only one of them is suspicious.
Why maintain a whitelist at all if you're going to have to turn the gain down to the point that 20 good entires are drowned out by one bad?
Note: I would not put much stock in the CNN list when it comes to VA. I'm not saying that they DON'T outsource, but VA bought machines that were assembled overseas to re-sell in the US, and that's not quite the same thing, IMHO, as laying someone off in order to send their work overseas.
Now, if VA is *currently* sending work overseas, I'd be interested in hearing about it from the horse's mouth... horse?
You misunderstand the nature of the wager. The wager is that Python, converted to Parrot bytecode and executed will be faster than CPython native execution. If that is true, it really does not matter that you use CPython's parser or not.
QM is testable. It's confusing, yes, but it's something THAT CAN ACTUALLY BE PROVEN OR DISPROVEN.
QM is testable yes. QM can be disproven, yes (not yet). No one has devised a way to prove QM other than by negatively failing to disprove it.
In fact, QM stems from Dirac essentially saying, "I have no idea how this works, but if energy were quantized the math would work."
I think you and I are basically on the same page, I'm just pointing out that religion isn't all that illogical either. Saying, for example, "This guy showed up 2000 years ago, claimed to be the son of an extraterrestrial power that created humans and performed a few impressive things that were not technologically possible in that day, so we continue to do what he told us to," is not too too silly. Now, I used Christianity as an example but you could point at Norse myth just as easily. I mean here you had an oral tradition that told you Salmon ran at a certain time of year, and oh by the by Odin strapped himself to a tree in order to gain knowledge.... When you see that, indeed the salmon run at a certain time of year the oral tradition gains some credibility. Why would you guess at the parts that are wrong (or were they?)
Magic is just as bad. Magic is a lump term for everything that is as yet undefined by any rigorous process. The shaman who said that when you boiled the bark of the tree into a tea and drank it, you would placate the spirits that caused your headache wasn't really all that far off, he just lacked a knowledge of chemistry that would let him understand that certain chemicals have behaviors without being anthropomorphic (e.g. spirits). I that case it was a chemical known as Salacitic (sp?) Acid, which turns out to be one half of Asprin.
That used to be "magic" and was the subject of religion. Now it's just "science", but nothing really changed. You can still go make willow-tree bark to cure your headache.
Perhaps for an anthropologist/sociologist/etc. Scientists came up with the scietific method to try and cope with just the sort of behavior
And yet, Einstein would not accept QM because it offended his concept of God. What's more, the scientific method is a means of assaulting theories over time in order to validate them. They are, almost always, negative proofs with circumstantial backing, and yet many smart people hold these theories to be true anyway (myself included).
The human mind is not a platform on which pure logic can easily be built, and if you delude yourself into thinking that, you will be lead astray.
you'll eventually decide that there's no way we can know ANYTHING
Correct.
Now a scientist will tell you that all that's bunk
That is not bunk, and many excellent theories exist which describe a Universe in which any number of variables which encompas "truth" can never be known (from Plank to Heisenberg to Hawking to Wolfram, many have cited differing reasons why reality as we know it might not be something that can be fully measured, or if it is, might exist within a mechanism which cannot be measured by us).
However, again we see the human failing at play: we have faith that we can somehow "understand" these things because they interact with us. It's just a pre-set response: touch thing, interact with thing, understand thing. We assume that that scales to the entire universe, and while it may, we have no real evidence to suggest that that's the case.
Any theory this is guaranteed unprovable is "bad" theory.
That would include QM. I don't get your definition of "bad" here.
Occam's Razon cuts it to shreds.
Too bad. If you lived your life in a small cave, then Occam's Razor would cut to shreds the idea that the heat coming from the cave mouth is the result of a giant, sustained fusion reaction, about 8.5 light seconds away, from which you are separated by a space filled with so few particals that for your purposes it might as well be hard vaccuum. I mean, c'mon, there are MUCH more simple explanations for the cave mouth being a source of warmth! I suppose you're going to tell me that the heat travels all that distance via some invisibly small particles that, through a trick of the light, have no mass!
Everything in our world violates Occam's Razor at one level or another, we simply use Occam's Razor to determine the path of least resistance in terms of which theories to follow first. When OR fails, you still have to fall back on the complex and/or improbable solution.
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
No, magic/myth/religion are the symptoms of the human though process. When we attempt to understand something, we start by externalizing it (that is to say, examining how it is or is not "us") and then anthropomorphizing it (that is, examining what it wants, how dangerous it is to us, and how we should react to it socially).
This is not a terribly logical way to approach problems, but it is the way everyone from Homer to Einstein has done it, and it does yield some results. What's more, you should not be so quick to use the word "truth" when refering to unknown phenomenon. Yeah, you're playing it fairly safe saying that "Yoda started the fires," isn't correct, but you don't actually KNOW that.
When people say "fires are starting without any seeming cause", your first reaction (yes, yours) is to ask "what do I know of that could cause that?" Now, if for most of your life people had been telling you that the world would end in fire because two giant fire gods would descend from the sky and start punishing those who wore the wrong underwear, you would certainly reflect on how this incident relates to what you'd been told to expect.
That *is* logical. What's not terribly logical is that because of our need to anthropomorphize, this solution is more attractive than "there's a huge wad of magma moving under some iron deposits near there causing electromagnetic "storms" much like the effect of a Tesla Coil." (yes, that's just as much bull**** as the fire gods, it's just an example, get over it)
That's not to say either solution is likely correct, it's just that we can't be sure when we're being biased (after all, we're the apes who think it's wrong to pen chickens so tight that they die standing up, but then happily tear into broccoli before it's even dead!)
Unfortunately, they haven't yet taken to heart the fact that a distribution-based business model isn't going to be viable over the long run for media companies, so they continue to fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo rather than adapting their business model to the changing market conditions.
And that is a good thing, for the most part.
It's not really good for the RIAA members, but it's good for business and the economy. It means that there is always an edge that small upstart companies will have: they take risks on new ideas. The truly troubling thing today is the amount of regulation and law that has as its primary goal defending large companies from such changing market conditions. The incentives need to be firmly on the side of risk if you want to continue to be competitive in the world market, but the US seems to have bought into the idea that only large, well-established companies can do that well.
That stagnation will kill US business... but perhaps that's what we need in order to give the next generation an example of what not to do.
Fine the RIAA sucks. But don't punish the artists who's labels chose to be members.
Should I also not "punish" the people who work at a fast food restaurant just because they happen to work for a company that makes lousy food? I buy entertainment products to be entertained (shocking, I know), and thinking about the fact that my money is going directly to an organization that sues 9 year old girls for "pircacy" makes the idea of listening to just about anything rather starkly non-entertaining.
If that hurts the artists, then they have exactly one direction to point their baleful stares... I'm sure the RIAA would be happy to explain to them why political overtones are appropriate for entertainment media, and help move sales.
I would never buy music from an RIAA-owned company again. I'm sorry, but they dragged their feet for years on engaging the Internet, sued every company that did, and then started suing their customers who gave up and did it themselves.
I'm done. I still buy CDs whenever I see an artist playing at a local establishment and they are selling their own CDs, but that's ALL I'll do (and that's a LOT of music anyway).
PASM is not a language, it's an assembler, true and I did not say it was anything else.
IMCC is a language in the same sense that K&R C or Forth are... it's just very simple.
If you believe Python on Parrot (or even a very small subset of it) will be ready for OSCON
Oh, I firmly believe that, just extrapolating from the progress to date. I don't think Python will be ready for prime time, but that's not the goal. The goal is to have an initial release that can be used for benchmarking, and that's certainly going to happen.
Everyone is seriously underestimating the complexity of Python
Not really. It's a strict B&D language (that's not pejorative, simply the approach, as opposed to a free-form, roll-your-own language like Perl or to an only slightly lesser extent C++), and as such has fairly simple rules. What's more, it's open source. I suspect most of the Parrot implementation will share code with the CPython implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, the guy was describing the sound of a pipe organ for two pages
And, did you READ those two pages? I did, and I not only learned quite a bit, but I found myself wanting to learn more!
I hate reading this kind of thing because it reminds me that we're now in the anti-erudite phase of American history. This happens periodically in most societies, and it's not surprising, but that doesn't mean I'm not saddened by it. Was a time that a guy writing a book, and spending two well-researched pages on a topic as obscure as how a pipe organ works would be welcomed and enjoyed for what it is, but now we have to slap the guy down for -- and I'm not making this up, it's a quote from the OP -- being "the literary equivalent of a nerdy kid who won't shut up about how smart he is."
It's not like Stephenson says, "hey, I'm smart, wanna see? huh? huh? huh?" No, he just writes about a wide range of technical and social issues, layering them with the fruits of his research.
Now, you want to talk about structure, we can get into that. I think his structure sucks, especially his endings. But, I put up with that because a) he has great ideas b) his characters react to those great ideas in interesting ways and c) I come out of one of his books knowing more, and having thought more about what I did know, than I did going in. Is that an unreasonable reaction to a good book?
If Stephenson an, say, Banks (or any other writer who can mold a storyline around a story without leaving stretch-marks) ever collaborated the result would be quite interesting to watch.
Development-stable vs. production-stable.
I keep pointing this out on Slashdot, and for some reason people keep missing it: What comes out of the Linux Kernel Developers is a development release. Just like any development release structure of sufficient size, they have several working branches and several stable branches, but that doesn't mean that what you get from a "stable branch" is a valid production release.
When a vendor releases a Linux system, I expect their kernel to be a valid production release. That is, they are going to support that release for some specified period of time, and it's not going to change in incompatible ways. Take a look at the history of 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and you'll see large numbers of incompatible changes (scheduling, filesystems, etc.), but they're compatible changes FROM THE DEVELOPER'S STANDPOINT. They don't change API's, but they might make your production installation behave radically differently.
I expect, e.g., Red Hat to release a 2.2.x kernel and continue to support it by back-porting security updates and critical bug-fixes, but otherwise LEAVE IT ALONE. They've not always done this, and part of that is that Linux is still in the late stages of an early adopter market (i.e. the market size is still growing in a logarithmic pattern). I can understand that, but in the future, I expect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 20.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 20.45 to differ very slightly, and possibly be separated by 5 or 10 YEARS. That leaves no room for kernel-of-the-year upgrades.
So, back to the point: backports are fine, as long as it's the developers doing the backporting. If vendors start picking up those backports just because they can, I have a problem with that. I also have a problem with a vendor that releases a kernel version that has been out less than a year....
Additionally, since it's the only entry on the above list that is missing or has limited support for transactions
Just flat-out untrue.
I know - you can get it with its slower innodb file system now
Actually, Berkeley DB and InnoDB both support transactions, but InnoDB is more complete, which is also (of course) why it is slower. In order to do propper transactional support, you have to inject a lot of overhead, and that's why MySQL has always been blazingly fast.
The great part is that you can still fall back on the MyISAM table type (which implements everything you need in terms of atomic inserts and updates, as long as that atomicity is not required across several statements) if you want that speed, because MySQL is modular enough to support that. Imagine that, a modular database... who'da thunk.
views
The lack of views is directly related to the lack of sub-queries, which is being addressed, but is still a questionable feature. Ultimately, I've never seen a query that used a sub-query that didn't actually need to be optimized through judicious uses of de-normalization. Views are just a hard-coded sub-query, and as such give tremendous flexibility to the programmer, but are nearly impossible to correctly optimize, and the performance bottlenecks aren't always obvious on the first pass.
Once sub-queries and views appear, I would still caution STRONGLY against their use.
So, if the non-ansi syntax isn't a big enough pain-in-the-butt
Well, that's really not fair. The syntax is no more deviant from ANSI than, say, Oracle or Sybase, but those databases' extensions have become so widly accepted that we don't think about how non-ANSI they are anymore.
Granted there are a few places (especially in the types arena) where MySQL does not yet implement some ANSI features, but I've never run into a significant problems in those regards. My applications port fairly cleanly when I want them to, but in many cases, I've choses in the architecture to rely on some key features of MySQL that aren't standard, and I've benefitted greatly from having done so. Sure, I could port to something else later, if I had to, but it would be a pain, and I'd lose functionality.
I suppose much of this will improve over time as they rewrite their engine to include more and more of that functionality that nobody wants
It's not that nobody wants it, it's that most of the people who want it aren't actually providing reasons as such. They are just whining about x, y or z metric to which their pet database conforms, and MySQL doesn't. That game is not interesting. Transactions were required for certain applications, so they were added. Sub-queries less so, and so they will be added, but much slower. Things like full ANSI type compatibility are required only if a) you don't use an ODBC layer that translates types for you or b) you want to just take your native SQLServer app and re-point it to a MySQL database.
Stored procedures and other similar features are just bloat, and gain you no real advantage (other than making a bridge between languages, which is the wrong place to solve that problem... after all it doesn't help you with your network protocols...).
The bottom line is that MySQL is a fairly low-level database. If you want something higher level, cool, go for it. But, in programming langauges you don't say "C is useless because it doesn't have all of the features of ADA", you just use the right tool for the job. Why is this so different?
I disagree. Any language which removes basic assumptions made by lower-level languages (e.g. that my int won't become a string when I'm not looking) will "slow" the language.
Perl 1..6 makes many tradeoffs which require that it be slower in execution than, for example, C. But that's not all bad. It gives you a level of semantic flexability that you don't have in those lower level languages. Granted, you pay for it, but I think the price is worth it.
As an example of what I meanWhat's the result? In your model, we would agree that the reuslt must be an integer, and specifically 1, but that's (woefully), not the case. You can't know that another thread hasn't womped the contents of $x and replaced it with a high level object that is "sort of 1" by the time the third statement executes. Worse,Here, we don't even know if we're dealing with integer addition! If $x is a URI, then hold on to your seat and enjoy the ride, but you're not going to be sure of the result.
I think the point the OP was making was that if this affects BGP, what power can the average user (or even medium-sized corporate user) have over it?
Well, it looks like pro-active security auditing saved the day....
"Disney would likely have tons of material to work with if stories from the first half of this century "
;-)
Ahem. I take your meaning, but you do realize we rolled the clocks forward a century, right?
Yeah, Disney is cutting off their nose to spite their face here. It's a bad call on the part of an organization whose core competence revolves around turning tired genres into enjoyable kids stories.
More importantly, this change in the way people listen to music signals a change in the way people are treating music. It's not very much like radio (jokes about modern stations' short playlists not withstanding). I want to listen to something that will NOT be the focus of my attention, but rather a mood setter.
Given that, is it any shock that you not only don't care about the artist's intended progression for the album, but actively don't want it grabbing at your attention for an hour or more?
Overlap between an animated show and live-action can be fairly workable. The animated show can, to some extent, work around time constraints (as long as they are relatively fixed) because taping of the voices happens separately. Thus, she could tape her voice on Tuesday and everyone else could tape on Wednesday, and that would be fine.
Of course, that's just an example, and it depends on how good her agent is.
Hey, watch it! A lot of ducks (sorry, waddling-challenged flight-enhanced avians) are quite sensitive about their facial features! They prefer the term "facial extension".
Yeah, tools like this are excellent. In the astro community, they use a tool called IDL (interactive data language, I think?) which is similar. High level constructs, with lots of big primatives to get you very fast computation.
Perl has an excellent tool called PDL that does roughly the same thing, and is used by the Perl/Gimp interface, yeilding some wonderful possibilities.
That said, Java was the right choice for this. Java may have poor systems integration and a host of issues that arise from that (i.e. Java's platform agnosticism, which actually turns into a sort of single-platform dependence on itself with little or no integration with its actual platform), but when it comes to handing thousands of people a program that is going to run mathematical calculations EXACTLY THE SAME WAY on every machine, Java has Python, Perl, Ruby, C# and a host of other high level languages beat because it allows you to enforce very specific constraints on how the math will be done. All of the others just provide you with varying degrees of abstraction on top of your native execution models.
Once Parrot is done, I suspect that more languages, ported to run on top of Parrot, will also offer these constraints as optional features, but time will tell.
Both is good.
The result table looks like thisHaving the whitelist does get you one extra bit of info, so it's useful insofar as it goes. In a system like SpamAssassin, you score high for "spam" results, a small negative for "not spam" results and zero for "unknown".
You're missing the point. There's no outsourcing here. VA was (as a great many others have been) a retail outlet for foreign computers. They weren't outsourcing anyting.
I have no problem with foreign products per se. Heck, I go to work in a Nissan, so I'd be pretty hypocritical if I said I did.
On the other hand, many of the companies on that list have unloaded their people during a bad economy with no respect for how increadibly hard it will be to find work, only to turn around and hire people overseas for a fraction of the cost. That's just plain wrong.
Not only is it both, but the suck factor seems to be heavily in the whitelist camp.
Take for example the spammer who wants to get his spam through to me. He peppers his document with HREFs to Yahoo!, Hotmail, CNN.com, NASA.gov and a dozen or so other sites that are likely in the whitelist.
Now I look at it and he manages to squeek by the initial origin lookup (e.g. he would have passed through traditional RBLs) and body check finds that *most* of the entires in the body are good sites, and only one of them is suspicious.
Why maintain a whitelist at all if you're going to have to turn the gain down to the point that 20 good entires are drowned out by one bad?
Note: I would not put much stock in the CNN list when it comes to VA. I'm not saying that they DON'T outsource, but VA bought machines that were assembled overseas to re-sell in the US, and that's not quite the same thing, IMHO, as laying someone off in order to send their work overseas.
Now, if VA is *currently* sending work overseas, I'd be interested in hearing about it from the horse's mouth... horse?
You misunderstand the nature of the wager. The wager is that Python, converted to Parrot bytecode and executed will be faster than CPython native execution. If that is true, it really does not matter that you use CPython's parser or not.
Or, summarized: we don't know how it works; we can't know how it works; and yet we often claim to know that those guys over there got it all wrong ;-)
QM is testable. It's confusing, yes, but it's something THAT CAN ACTUALLY BE PROVEN OR DISPROVEN.
QM is testable yes. QM can be disproven, yes (not yet). No one has devised a way to prove QM other than by negatively failing to disprove it.
In fact, QM stems from Dirac essentially saying, "I have no idea how this works, but if energy were quantized the math would work."
I think you and I are basically on the same page, I'm just pointing out that religion isn't all that illogical either. Saying, for example, "This guy showed up 2000 years ago, claimed to be the son of an extraterrestrial power that created humans and performed a few impressive things that were not technologically possible in that day, so we continue to do what he told us to," is not too too silly. Now, I used Christianity as an example but you could point at Norse myth just as easily. I mean here you had an oral tradition that told you Salmon ran at a certain time of year, and oh by the by Odin strapped himself to a tree in order to gain knowledge.... When you see that, indeed the salmon run at a certain time of year the oral tradition gains some credibility. Why would you guess at the parts that are wrong (or were they?)
Magic is just as bad. Magic is a lump term for everything that is as yet undefined by any rigorous process. The shaman who said that when you boiled the bark of the tree into a tea and drank it, you would placate the spirits that caused your headache wasn't really all that far off, he just lacked a knowledge of chemistry that would let him understand that certain chemicals have behaviors without being anthropomorphic (e.g. spirits). I that case it was a chemical known as Salacitic (sp?) Acid, which turns out to be one half of Asprin.
That used to be "magic" and was the subject of religion. Now it's just "science", but nothing really changed. You can still go make willow-tree bark to cure your headache.
Perhaps for an anthropologist/sociologist/etc. Scientists came up with the scietific method to try and cope with just the sort of behavior
And yet, Einstein would not accept QM because it offended his concept of God. What's more, the scientific method is a means of assaulting theories over time in order to validate them. They are, almost always, negative proofs with circumstantial backing, and yet many smart people hold these theories to be true anyway (myself included).
The human mind is not a platform on which pure logic can easily be built, and if you delude yourself into thinking that, you will be lead astray.
you'll eventually decide that there's no way we can know ANYTHING
Correct.
Now a scientist will tell you that all that's bunk
That is not bunk, and many excellent theories exist which describe a Universe in which any number of variables which encompas "truth" can never be known (from Plank to Heisenberg to Hawking to Wolfram, many have cited differing reasons why reality as we know it might not be something that can be fully measured, or if it is, might exist within a mechanism which cannot be measured by us).
However, again we see the human failing at play: we have faith that we can somehow "understand" these things because they interact with us. It's just a pre-set response: touch thing, interact with thing, understand thing. We assume that that scales to the entire universe, and while it may, we have no real evidence to suggest that that's the case.
Any theory this is guaranteed unprovable is "bad" theory.
That would include QM. I don't get your definition of "bad" here.
Occam's Razon cuts it to shreds.
Too bad. If you lived your life in a small cave, then Occam's Razor would cut to shreds the idea that the heat coming from the cave mouth is the result of a giant, sustained fusion reaction, about 8.5 light seconds away, from which you are separated by a space filled with so few particals that for your purposes it might as well be hard vaccuum. I mean, c'mon, there are MUCH more simple explanations for the cave mouth being a source of warmth! I suppose you're going to tell me that the heat travels all that distance via some invisibly small particles that, through a trick of the light, have no mass!
Everything in our world violates Occam's Razor at one level or another, we simply use Occam's Razor to determine the path of least resistance in terms of which theories to follow first. When OR fails, you still have to fall back on the complex and/or improbable solution.
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
No, magic/myth/religion are the symptoms of the human though process. When we attempt to understand something, we start by externalizing it (that is to say, examining how it is or is not "us") and then anthropomorphizing it (that is, examining what it wants, how dangerous it is to us, and how we should react to it socially).
This is not a terribly logical way to approach problems, but it is the way everyone from Homer to Einstein has done it, and it does yield some results. What's more, you should not be so quick to use the word "truth" when refering to unknown phenomenon. Yeah, you're playing it fairly safe saying that "Yoda started the fires," isn't correct, but you don't actually KNOW that.
When people say "fires are starting without any seeming cause", your first reaction (yes, yours) is to ask "what do I know of that could cause that?" Now, if for most of your life people had been telling you that the world would end in fire because two giant fire gods would descend from the sky and start punishing those who wore the wrong underwear, you would certainly reflect on how this incident relates to what you'd been told to expect.
That *is* logical. What's not terribly logical is that because of our need to anthropomorphize, this solution is more attractive than "there's a huge wad of magma moving under some iron deposits near there causing electromagnetic "storms" much like the effect of a Tesla Coil." (yes, that's just as much bull**** as the fire gods, it's just an example, get over it)
That's not to say either solution is likely correct, it's just that we can't be sure when we're being biased (after all, we're the apes who think it's wrong to pen chickens so tight that they die standing up, but then happily tear into broccoli before it's even dead!)
Unfortunately, they haven't yet taken to heart the fact that a distribution-based business model isn't going to be viable over the long run for media companies, so they continue to fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo rather than adapting their business model to the changing market conditions.
And that is a good thing, for the most part.
It's not really good for the RIAA members, but it's good for business and the economy. It means that there is always an edge that small upstart companies will have: they take risks on new ideas. The truly troubling thing today is the amount of regulation and law that has as its primary goal defending large companies from such changing market conditions. The incentives need to be firmly on the side of risk if you want to continue to be competitive in the world market, but the US seems to have bought into the idea that only large, well-established companies can do that well.
That stagnation will kill US business... but perhaps that's what we need in order to give the next generation an example of what not to do.
Fine the RIAA sucks. But don't punish the artists who's labels chose to be members.
Should I also not "punish" the people who work at a fast food restaurant just because they happen to work for a company that makes lousy food? I buy entertainment products to be entertained (shocking, I know), and thinking about the fact that my money is going directly to an organization that sues 9 year old girls for "pircacy" makes the idea of listening to just about anything rather starkly non-entertaining.
If that hurts the artists, then they have exactly one direction to point their baleful stares... I'm sure the RIAA would be happy to explain to them why political overtones are appropriate for entertainment media, and help move sales.
I would never buy music from an RIAA-owned company again. I'm sorry, but they dragged their feet for years on engaging the Internet, sued every company that did, and then started suing their customers who gave up and did it themselves.
I'm done. I still buy CDs whenever I see an artist playing at a local establishment and they are selling their own CDs, but that's ALL I'll do (and that's a LOT of music anyway).
PASM is not a language, it's an assembler, true and I did not say it was anything else.
IMCC is a language in the same sense that K&R C or Forth are... it's just very simple.
If you believe Python on Parrot (or even a very small subset of it) will be ready for OSCON
Oh, I firmly believe that, just extrapolating from the progress to date. I don't think Python will be ready for prime time, but that's not the goal. The goal is to have an initial release that can be used for benchmarking, and that's certainly going to happen.
Everyone is seriously underestimating the complexity of Python
Not really. It's a strict B&D language (that's not pejorative, simply the approach, as opposed to a free-form, roll-your-own language like Perl or to an only slightly lesser extent C++), and as such has fairly simple rules. What's more, it's open source. I suspect most of the Parrot implementation will share code with the CPython implementation.
Stay tuned...