During the Cold War, the US ran a service called "Radio Free Europe" for providing uncensored news to people in countries behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps when prices come down, the West should organize a wireless network for the use of people in China, North Korea, etc.
Are you seriously claiming that having a bunch of guys look at paper ballots is accurate and fair? Maybe Australians are simply more honest then other folk (I will ignore the obvious joke about the ancestry of Australians), but it seems that manual counting is far worse than even the primitive machines that the US uses -- you can't bribe machines, but you can certainly bribe people.
It was the Soviet biological warfare testing site. They would chain chimpanzees there to poles and see how long it would take them to die from various agents.
If you are interested in the subject, another book, Anthrax: The investigation of a deadly outbreak by Jeanne Guillemin is also of interest. This is far more detailed and includes interviews with people directly involved.
Alibek's book is good for learning about Biopreparat activities, but he knew only about Sverdlosk second hand, as the anthrax plant was not run by Biopreparat.
Yes, diversity is bad. All systems must be the same for the benefit of poorly trained tech support staff. Why would users want to have the ability to shop around and buy a computer with the interface they prefer?
Well, while I'm partial to HPL myself, his genius lay mostly in his ideas of cosmic horror -- his actual writing was rather turgid itself and full of pointlessly obscure words like "squamous", "rugose", and "eldritch".
Although in the cancer field "squamous" is not uncommonly used, and whatever I hear it in a seminar the whole thing takes on a sinister Mythos significance (1D4/1D10 SAN loss)
It's even worse. There would be no e-mail delivery on Saturdays (mail doesn't get delivered in Canada on Saturdays) and you wouldn't be able to e-mail from your home (Canada Post doesn't pick up letters from people's mailboxes; you have to go to a public mailbox or the post office to mail things).
I'm an American living in Canada, and while Canada is in general a pretty nice place to life, Canada Post is pretty scary. Think of all the jokes we Americans have about the US Postal Service. Compared to Canada Post it gives good service.
Re:The better question is ...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
For example, why doesn't all business application development get done in COBOL, or FORTRAN, or C, or C++? Because newer languages are more productive
Certainly not all code is written in those four languages, but the majority of business applications *are* written in one of them. Functional languages have comparatively little support outside academia, and even there they are fading somewhat because their typical use, symbolic AI, is no longer the "hot" area of CS.
There are plenty of objective reasons, but they probably go beyond the scope of a/. discussion.
There is a reason why arguments about editors and programming languages are termed "religious wars". Any such "proof" of the superiority of one language over another can be easily denied by the supporters of another language exactly in the manner of religious arguments.
As another poster mentioned, Unlambda and Intercal are also Turing complete, and their existence alone effectively disproves your argument.
Oh, hardly. Those joke languages are hard only because they are so *different* from what we are used to. To give an analogy from human languages, I can say Chinese is hard because it has all those tones, and Chinese speakers can say English is hard because it has all those verb tenses. It's all about what you are used to.
The question is how long it will take, and how much effort you will have to expend to get there. Advances in programming languages are quite closely analogous.
Not really. Someone writing in a language that they like and know well is more productive than someone writing in a language they hate or don't know well. To bring this back to the topic of the article, which scripting language is best? It's all subjective. I hate tcl, for example, but some people love it.
How do you know this? And which languages do you know? If you've never experienced the productivity differences between different languages, you can't be familiar with much of a variety of them.
I know from experience, and I know quite a few, languages having programmed since 1981. let's see:
What I have found however, is that different *implementations* of languages can provide quite a productivity difference. For example, some FORTHs have quite a few words defined, and others have only the basics. But that isn't a function of the language itself.
In Perl, "missing data" normally generates "Use of uninitialized value" warnings. You are using -w, right?
Yes, I use -w, and even "use strict" but that doesn't stop me from using
my ($a, $b, $c) = split("\t", $_);
on tab-delimited data. If one of the fields is not there no warning will be issued (and that's the way I like it)
I'm not familiar with Ruby, but it sounds like Ruby's "nil" is equivalent to Perl's "undef" and C/Java/etc's "null", which is generally considered a good thing as it catches many logic errors before they can do more serious harm.
Of course, at some point you have to admit that a scripting language that is as strict as a compiled language is pretty useless (because then, why not write in the compiled language?). Of course, where that point lies is a matter for debate.
Re:Less tran truthful advertising...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
You just defined the class chair. It wasn't an existing type. Nobody is claining that Puthon doesn't allow inheritance of user classes.
Re:The better question is ...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
That's like saying "why complicate things with another means of transportation when we already have horses, feet, dogsleds, etc. etc.?"
Bad analogy. There is real progress in transportation -- new methods are cheaper, faster, etc. There is no real progress in programming languages. All of them (sans a few mini-languages) are Turing complete and so are objectively exactly the same. Everything else is merely a matter of taste. Quite a few engineers and natural scientists still use FORTRAN, after all.
You seem to think that functional languages are somehow more "advanced" than procedural languages. There is no objective reason to support this conclusion -- it is like saying chocolate ice cream is more advanced than strawberry
On the other hand, I have to admit that I'm a sucker for new languages myself. I *know* that new languages can't really make me more productive, but they sure are fun.
I have been fiddling around with Ruby and while I think that it is much cleaner than Perl and even Python, I am still mostly using Perl. One of the reasons is the relatively uninteresting reason that other people I work with use Perl, but some have to do with annoyances of Ruby:
1) In Ruby, strings and Numbers both use < and > for comparison. Why is this bad? Isn't it cleaner to do this rather than bother with Perl's "le" and "ge" for strings and <, >, for numbers? Yes, but: In Ruby there is no autoconversion like in perl. If I use "split" to generate an array of fields from a columned list of numbers, those numbers will not be numbers, but strings. This means they will be compared as strings, screwing up numerical order. Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad! Yes, I *know* Ruby has.to_i, etc., but it is too easy to forget to use them when needed.
2) nil is not equal to zero. This means in data with variable numbers of fields, you have to write code that handles this case -- it isn't like Perl where missing data is treated as 0 or "" depending on the context. Yes, maybe Ruby's way is cleaner, but it is annoying in practice.
Actually, I'd say "decoding" is just a journalist term. I've never heard anyone who actually does sequencing or bioinformatics refer to sequence analysis as "decoding".
Your reply only galvanizes my point, you are fixated and one-dimensional. Who was taling about economics? Who the hell is talking about being a 'competitor'? Economics is the last thing of importance in the world, life, love, health, happiness, peace, nature - then (maybe) money(economics).
Well, we were talking about business, which means we *were* talking about economics. Secondly, all those benefits like peace and happiness that you are talking about can only be created by spending money, something which the government of Canada understands quite well.
I have a co-worker who thinks that Tomb Raider was similar to the Indy movies, but the Indy movies at least made sense. None of the stupid stuff like finding *both* pieces of a triangle to stop the bad guys when merely destroying one half would solve the problem.
I'm an American living in Canada, and I think I can be fairly objective about the situation. Canada has 30 million people. That's like the population of California. Of *course* Canada isn't treated as an equal partner to the USA. The only countries with a population similar or greater in size to the USA are second and third world countries with limited economies at present. The only sign of something in the near future that will be a real competitor to the USA is the EU.
Okay, I read the links. A guy who lives in Russia with his Russian wife sensibly writes an article about Russia, and a bunch of people (mostly Americans) claim that he's wrong and is an anti-Russian bigot besides. Okay, sure, whatever. So what was your point again?
Re:Reminds me of "Rain on the Scarecrow"
on
Dot-com Liquidator
·
· Score: 2
I can't really compare the hardships of farmers seeing their family business grow steadily downhill to the things happening with some of these dotcom chuckleheads.
Yeah, when farmers screw up there are crop subsidies to bail them out. How can that be compared with the dot-commers that actually have to suffer?
The problem with systems like Slackware is libraries -- there is simply no way to upgrade individual packages without a significant chance that other packages will break. If you simply upgrade your entire system at once, them perhaps that isn't an issue. Or if you don't mind having a broken system for a few days while you sort out which incompatible version of an obscure library stops your favorite window manager from starting, then I guess it isn't an issue either. Does experiencing such problems teach one about Linux? Yeah, I guess it does. I sure learned a lot from Slackware and even earlier distributions that I used in the early '90s. So much in fact, that Linux isn't just a hobby at home for me anymore, but also a tool which I use for work. And there, fiddling with libraries for hours just isn't acceptable. And that's why dependencies are useful -- even for gurus who *can* solve problems, given enough time.
Yes, Debian sucks. It is the nature of operating systems to suck. However, as someone who uses both Debian and RedHat, I have to say that Debian sucks less (in terms of broken depenancies and other weirdness) that RedHat. You mention Slackware, which has no dependancies. While you may have fond memories of using such systems, there is a reason why modern distributions have all gone to including dependancies -- they really cure more headaches than they cause. Now, the BSD source-based packaging systems might work well -- I haven't tried them, but in theory they sound good.
Before reading the comments here, I never thought the thought. They just scream 'greys' in form. But I agree that the ending makes more sense when you think of them as future robots. So if that was the intent, then it was just a horrible mistake in visuals. I mean Really Really Horrible.
I guess there's no point in not talking directly -- anyone reading the thread has seen the movie or doesn't care about spoilers.
Why do the robots look like stereotypical aliens? For the same reason why aliens are depicted that way -- the slender body and big head are signs of beings that are specialized for thinking rather than physical activity. With their antigravity tech or whatever it is, there is no need for them to do physical work.
Well, the future civilization is neat, and not entirely happy, if you think about whose civilization it is. I agree that there was no point to giving David what he wants. In fact, realizing that you can't always have what you want would have been a good moral to illustrate.
Whatever happened to the MCC distribution? That was another old-time (i.e. pre-RedHat) distribution. I started with MCC, then went to Slackware, then to RedHat and then to Debian.
The reason why I use NS/Mozilla clients under Linux is that Balsa, et al don't support HTML-formatted mail, making them almost useless for me. I can deal with not sending HTML mail, but every other e-mail I receive these days is HTML-formatted.
Slashdot Mirror
During the Cold War, the US ran a service called "Radio Free Europe" for providing uncensored news to people in countries behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps when prices come down, the West should organize a wireless network for the use of people in China, North Korea, etc.
Are you seriously claiming that having a bunch of guys look at paper ballots is accurate and fair? Maybe Australians are simply more honest then other folk (I will ignore the obvious joke about the ancestry of Australians), but it seems that manual counting is far worse than even the primitive machines that the US uses -- you can't bribe machines, but you can certainly bribe people.
It was the Soviet biological warfare testing site. They would chain chimpanzees there to poles and see how long it would take them to die from various agents.
If you are interested in the subject, another book, Anthrax: The investigation of a deadly outbreak by Jeanne Guillemin is also of interest. This is far more detailed and includes interviews with people directly involved.
Alibek's book is good for learning about Biopreparat activities, but he knew only about Sverdlosk second hand, as the anthrax plant was not run by Biopreparat.
Yes, diversity is bad. All systems must be the same for the benefit of poorly trained tech support staff. Why would users want to have the ability to shop around and buy a computer with the interface they prefer?
Well, while I'm partial to HPL myself, his genius lay mostly in his ideas of cosmic horror -- his actual writing was rather turgid itself and full of pointlessly obscure words like "squamous", "rugose", and "eldritch".
Although in the cancer field "squamous" is not uncommonly used, and whatever I hear it in a seminar the whole thing takes on a sinister Mythos significance (1D4/1D10 SAN loss)
It's even worse. There would be no e-mail delivery on Saturdays (mail doesn't get delivered in Canada on Saturdays) and you wouldn't be able to e-mail from your home (Canada Post doesn't pick up letters from people's mailboxes; you have to go to a public mailbox or the post office to mail things).
I'm an American living in Canada, and while Canada is in general a pretty nice place to life, Canada Post is pretty scary. Think of all the jokes we Americans have about the US Postal Service. Compared to Canada Post it gives good service.
For example, why doesn't all business application development get done in COBOL, or FORTRAN, or C, or C++? Because newer languages are more productive
Certainly not all code is written in those four languages, but the majority of business applications *are* written in one of them. Functional languages have comparatively little support outside academia, and even there they are fading somewhat because their typical use, symbolic AI, is no longer the "hot" area of CS.
There are plenty of objective reasons, but they probably go beyond the scope of a
There is a reason why arguments about editors and programming languages are termed "religious wars". Any such "proof" of the superiority of one language over another can be easily denied by the supporters of another language exactly in the manner of religious arguments.
As another poster mentioned, Unlambda and Intercal are also Turing complete, and their existence alone effectively disproves your argument.
Oh, hardly. Those joke languages are hard only because they are so *different* from what we are used to. To give an analogy from human languages, I can say Chinese is hard because it has all those tones, and Chinese speakers can say English is hard because it has all those verb tenses. It's all about what you are used to.
The question is how long it will take, and how much effort you will have to expend to get there. Advances in programming languages are quite closely analogous.
Not really. Someone writing in a language that they like and know well is more productive than someone writing in a language they hate or don't know well. To bring this back to the topic of the article, which scripting language is best? It's all subjective. I hate tcl, for example, but some people love it.
How do you know this? And which languages do you know? If you've never experienced the productivity differences between different languages, you can't be familiar with much of a variety of them.
I know from experience, and I know quite a few, languages having programmed since 1981. let's see:
Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Forth, Actor, Perl, Python, Ruby, tcl, awk, Smalltalk-80, Emacs Lisp, ML, Eiffel
What I have found however, is that different *implementations* of languages can provide quite a productivity difference. For example, some FORTHs have quite a few words defined, and others have only the basics. But that isn't a function of the language itself.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
In Perl, "missing data" normally generates "Use of uninitialized value" warnings. You are using -w, right?
Yes, I use -w, and even "use strict" but that doesn't stop me from using
my ($a, $b, $c) = split("\t", $_);
on tab-delimited data. If one of the fields is not there no warning will be issued (and that's the way I like it)
I'm not familiar with Ruby, but it sounds like Ruby's "nil" is equivalent to Perl's "undef" and C/Java/etc's "null", which is generally considered a good thing as it catches many logic errors before they can do more serious harm.
Of course, at some point you have to admit that a scripting language that is as strict as a compiled language is pretty useless (because then, why not write in the compiled language?). Of course, where that point lies is a matter for debate.
You just defined the class chair. It wasn't an existing type. Nobody is claining that Puthon doesn't allow inheritance of user classes.
That's like saying "why complicate things with another means of transportation when we already have horses, feet, dogsleds, etc. etc.?"
Bad analogy. There is real progress in transportation -- new methods are cheaper, faster, etc. There is no real progress in programming languages. All of them (sans a few mini-languages) are Turing complete and so are objectively exactly the same. Everything else is merely a matter of taste. Quite a few engineers and natural scientists still use FORTRAN, after all.
You seem to think that functional languages are somehow more "advanced" than procedural languages. There is no objective reason to support this conclusion -- it is like saying chocolate ice cream is more advanced than strawberry
On the other hand, I have to admit that I'm a sucker for new languages myself. I *know* that new languages can't really make me more productive, but they sure are fun.
I have been fiddling around with Ruby and while I think that it is much cleaner than Perl and even Python, I am still mostly using Perl. One of the reasons is the relatively uninteresting reason that other people I work with use Perl, but some have to do with annoyances of Ruby:
.to_i, etc., but it is too easy to forget to use them when needed.
1) In Ruby, strings and Numbers both use < and > for comparison. Why is this bad? Isn't it cleaner to do this rather than bother with Perl's "le" and "ge" for strings and <, >, for numbers? Yes, but: In Ruby there is no autoconversion like in perl. If I use "split" to generate an array of fields from a columned list of numbers, those numbers will not be numbers, but strings. This means they will be compared as strings, screwing up numerical order. Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad! Yes, I *know* Ruby has
2) nil is not equal to zero. This means in data with variable numbers of fields, you have to write code that handles this case -- it isn't like Perl where missing data is treated as 0 or "" depending on the context. Yes, maybe Ruby's way is cleaner, but it is annoying in practice.
Actually, I'd say "decoding" is just a journalist term. I've never heard anyone who actually does sequencing or bioinformatics refer to sequence analysis as "decoding".
It really proves that to get the best chances, GO TO THE CASINO! At least you can see if they are swapping card on you or something.
But this article is talking about *video poker*, which if you haven't been to Vegas, is played using electronic machines even in the casinos.
Your reply only galvanizes my point, you are fixated and one-dimensional. Who was taling about economics? Who the hell is talking about being a 'competitor'? Economics is the last thing of importance in the world, life, love, health, happiness, peace, nature - then (maybe) money(economics).
Well, we were talking about business, which means we *were* talking about economics. Secondly, all those benefits like peace and happiness that you are talking about can only be created by spending money, something which the government of Canada understands quite well.
I have a co-worker who thinks that Tomb Raider was similar to the Indy movies, but the Indy movies at least made sense. None of the stupid stuff like finding *both* pieces of a triangle to stop the bad guys when merely destroying one half would solve the problem.
I'm an American living in Canada, and I think I can be fairly objective about the situation. Canada has 30 million people. That's like the population of California. Of *course* Canada isn't treated as an equal partner to the USA. The only countries with a population similar or greater in size to the USA are second and third world countries with limited economies at present. The only sign of something in the near future that will be a real competitor to the USA is the EU.
Okay, I read the links. A guy who lives in Russia with his Russian wife sensibly writes an article about Russia, and a bunch of people (mostly Americans) claim that he's wrong and is an anti-Russian bigot besides. Okay, sure, whatever. So what was your point again?
I can't really compare the hardships of farmers seeing their family business grow steadily downhill to the things happening with some of these dotcom chuckleheads.
Yeah, when farmers screw up there are crop subsidies to bail them out. How can that be compared with the dot-commers that actually have to suffer?
The problem with systems like Slackware is libraries -- there is simply no way to upgrade individual packages without a significant chance that other packages will break. If you simply upgrade your entire system at once, them perhaps that isn't an issue. Or if you don't mind having a broken system for a few days while you sort out which incompatible version of an obscure library stops your favorite window manager from starting, then I guess it isn't an issue either. Does experiencing such problems teach one about Linux? Yeah, I guess it does. I sure learned a lot from Slackware and even earlier distributions that I used in the early '90s. So much in fact, that Linux isn't just a hobby at home for me anymore, but also a tool which I use for work. And there, fiddling with libraries for hours just isn't acceptable. And that's why dependencies are useful -- even for gurus who *can* solve problems, given enough time.
Yes, Debian sucks. It is the nature of operating systems to suck. However, as someone who uses both Debian and RedHat, I have to say that Debian sucks less (in terms of broken depenancies and other weirdness) that RedHat. You mention Slackware, which has no dependancies. While you may have fond memories of using such systems, there is a reason why modern distributions have all gone to including dependancies -- they really cure more headaches than they cause. Now, the BSD source-based packaging systems might work well -- I haven't tried them, but in theory they sound good.
Before reading the comments here, I never thought the thought. They just scream 'greys' in form. But I agree that the ending makes more sense when you think of them as future robots. So if that was the intent, then it was just a horrible mistake in visuals. I mean Really Really Horrible.
I guess there's no point in not talking directly -- anyone reading the thread has seen the movie or doesn't care about spoilers.
Why do the robots look like stereotypical aliens? For the same reason why aliens are depicted that way -- the slender body and big head are signs of beings that are specialized for thinking rather than physical activity. With their antigravity tech or whatever it is, there is no need for them to do physical work.
Well, the future civilization is neat, and not entirely happy, if you think about whose civilization it is. I agree that there was no point to giving David what he wants. In fact, realizing that you can't always have what you want would have been a good moral to illustrate.
Whatever happened to the MCC distribution? That was another old-time (i.e. pre-RedHat) distribution. I started with MCC, then went to Slackware, then to RedHat and then to Debian.
The reason why I use NS/Mozilla clients under Linux is that Balsa, et al don't support HTML-formatted mail, making them almost useless for me. I can deal with not sending HTML mail, but every other e-mail I receive these days is HTML-formatted.