To have the govt set up a service with humans that read web sites to any blind web surfer? Could be linked via a collaboration program so both would be seeing the same site. Overall, this seems cheaper to the US economy than forcing every business in the US to redesign their web site.
Have you ever heard of this thing called "HTML"? If you use this "HTML" stuff to design your website, it will be able to be read by blind people. If on the other hand, you use flash, or put all your textual content in.gif files or something it won't be.
In other words, you actually have to work to make a website that can't be read by blind people. Since these companies already put so much effort only to exclude people, they might as well put in a little more to fix the problem.
The fact that computer languages are somewhat metaphorically related to human languages does not mean you can use facts about human languages to prove things about computer languages.
The only thing they even have in common is that they are called languages.
Sure, VB makes it easier to pop open windows and stick buttons on them, but that has more to do with the flaws in the win32 API that people use when writing C++ aps for windows then any strength in VB. You can do the same thing in Visual C++, but filling out a few wizards, and clicking 'compile' you get your own window. Sure, VC generates a shitload of code for you, but you still don't have to.
In contrast with languages like Scheme, Java, etc, which really do require less code to do anything visual basically actually impedes what you do, due to the seriously lacking language features. Classes can be done Via COM, but good luck if you want to do something like polymorphism, or passing functions around or whatever.
I've coded in VB, and trust me, the reason people don't like it is because it's weak and it sucks. I constantly found myself smashing up against the limitations of the language. Things that would be easy to do in java or even C++ were impossible from a practical standpoint in VB.
Of course, things may have changed some in VB.net. But considering the fact that VB.net isn't even compatible with pervious VBs, I couldn't really care.
In Visual C++, to open a window takes about 104 lines of code if you estimate the number without doing any research like myself. In Visual Basic, you can open a window just by creating a new project and hitting 'Run'. It's easy, and that's why it works.
I remember getting into a debate with some kids about this in highschool. The next day, I'd produced a program that would bounce a ball around in a window in 30 lines of code.
By "squishing" the code down (although, with only one semicolon per line, outside of for loops) I was able to get it down to 23 lines. Keep in mind I was in highschool.
Oh, and looking over the comments, I still used windows messaging. If I wrote this code today, I'd probably be able to get it done with even less code.
but besides that, the core of the OS dosn't need to be very big, so you really can check everything.
A huge program in C++ will probably have tons of buffer overflows to exploit. A Large Java program will have ZERO overflows.
It's like comparing a hand grenade to an orange. Both can be handled safely, but an orange is just not going to blow up, no matter what you do, while the hand grenade has an increasing chance of exploding the more you fiddle with it.
Does the skill of the programmer prevail over the limitations of the language and paradigm used
Well, yeah. I mean, duh.
Seriously though, while OCaml might have been a better language for the various problems, it should be possible to do it in C, assembly, PASCAL, whatever. It might not be a good idea but it can still be done.
If the second team had known and used OCaml, or some other OO language... or hell even Java or C++ they would have had an easier time. But it may have been that they wanted to give themselves a challenge, to prove that they could do what some could do in OCaml in plain C.
A while ago I was reading about how some proceduralist was complaining that these competitions weren't fair to non-functional coders. The argument made sense, but it shouldn't have been impossible to do the coding in a procedural language.
In fact, I was thinking of doing the contest in Visual basic, just for spite:P
Come on, Microsoft and bill gates have had bad terms associated with them at google for ages. Assuming that google changed this just for M$'s sake is ludicris.
If that was all they were worried about, they could simply have manually changed those searches to exclude MS (as they have done for people as small as Bernie Shiftman), that guy who spammed his resume around everywhere. Searches on his name would turn up pages bitching about him.)
Alltheweb works pretty well as a google alternative, and it has a better design too:)
Don't get the wrong idea, I like google, but having just one search engine that's commonly used is a bad idea. No other company can really compete due to the fact that google has so much traffic to sell ads on.
So anyway, that's why I pimp alltheweb whenever this topic comes up.
According to this Wired article, recent tweaks to Google's PageRank search algorithm have degraded rather than improved the accuracy of the results
Actualy, according to the artical, a few people who run blogs seem to think that google has been degraded, while google itself has not seen a higher number of actual complaints.
Basicaly what happened is that google took some mesures to reduce the effects of "googlebombing" by bloggers.
It dosn't cost much to play a song, but radio stations are required to pay small amounts of money for each song they play.
But, although it's illegal, record companies pay huge amounts of money (or 'payola') to get their songs played, so people hear them. It's a promotional thing.
Not every song is a payola song, though. It's just something that *can* happen.
Neither of these is worth paying much attention to: Congress is about to wrap up and go home for the year, and will start afresh in January with a clean slate. Perhaps in January some bright Congressperson will introduce a bill which actually takes strong steps toward repealing the DMCA.
Oh, thanks great god of everything. You are so much smarter then all of us, thanks for comming to our conclusions for us. Doing that is so much work.
This could be good, but.
on
Napster: The Movie
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well first of all no one has any idea if this guy can actualy act. If he can't, he'll need to have a good director that can work around his lack of abity (cf. The Matrix).
But I doubt this will be any good. I used to watch MTV a lot, and all their movies, without fail, sucked.
God the onion is so lame these days. Dosn't everyone know that radio stations already pay for the music they play? (not much, (probably less then they were paid to play it, if they're a clear channel station) but still something)
The onion sucks now. And it's getting worse by the week.
You know, they have software that does your spelling for you know.
But yeah, I know what you mean, there is a huge difference in image quality between various monitors and video cards. I used to have a really nice Acer monitor (nice in image quality, anyway, not in it's ability to not fall apart...). I put a cheap S3 video card in there (after they got their 3d act together) and the fucking image rippled at high resolutions. It was ridiculous!
but when it's on a simple swab of paper, the only variable is the light source.
Yeah, obviously the color on a piece of paper is going to stay constant with constant light, but how do you propose to transfer that image without color loss in the 'analog' world? Obviously a lot of things are going to affect transfer from medium to medium. Probably more so then in the digital medium. After all, an image might look different on different monitors, but the data stays exactly the same.
Btw, this is kind of an annoyance of mine, what's' the deal with calling film cameras 'analog'? They don't use analog electrical signals, a more proper term would be "optical", "Chemical" or even "photographic". Chemical would probably be the best term, since photographic is kind of generic.
Anyway, electro-analog images are terrible at color correction, there's a reason people call NTSC (our analog TV standard) Never Twice the Same Color. And even if it did have good color correction, we are certainly not about to start using NTSC or some other analog image format with our digital cellphones!
Slashdot Mirror
To have the govt set up a service with humans that read web sites to any blind web surfer? Could be linked via a collaboration program so both would be seeing the same site. Overall, this seems cheaper to the US economy than forcing every business in the US to redesign their web site.
.gif files or something it won't be.
Have you ever heard of this thing called "HTML"? If you use this "HTML" stuff to design your website, it will be able to be read by blind people. If on the other hand, you use flash, or put all your textual content in
In other words, you actually have to work to make a website that can't be read by blind people. Since these companies already put so much effort only to exclude people, they might as well put in a little more to fix the problem.
All you have to do is have your content be available in plain text format. In otherwords, plain HTML. If you do this, your page will be compliant.
It actualy takes work to make webpages incompatable.
You don't have to translate you're page into 300 languages at all.
What is up with people spreading that link around. the wtc2002.org design has been soundly rebuffed by anyone with any esthetic sense whatsoever.
In other words, it's butt ugly.
To make the story short, language shapes the mind of its speaker.
*yawn*
You're ability to say things does not make them true. When will people learn this?
You missed "deluge" "showers" and "storm"
Don't those usualy involve something being, you know, funny?
Or was I mistaken?
I forgot about the lack of threading. That one's just absolute murder.
The fact that computer languages are somewhat metaphorically related to human languages does not mean you can use facts about human languages to prove things about computer languages.
The only thing they even have in common is that they are called languages.
Sure, VB makes it easier to pop open windows and stick buttons on them, but that has more to do with the flaws in the win32 API that people use when writing C++ aps for windows then any strength in VB. You can do the same thing in Visual C++, but filling out a few wizards, and clicking 'compile' you get your own window. Sure, VC generates a shitload of code for you, but you still don't have to.
In contrast with languages like Scheme, Java, etc, which really do require less code to do anything visual basically actually impedes what you do, due to the seriously lacking language features. Classes can be done Via COM, but good luck if you want to do something like polymorphism, or passing functions around or whatever.
I've coded in VB, and trust me, the reason people don't like it is because it's weak and it sucks. I constantly found myself smashing up against the limitations of the language. Things that would be easy to do in java or even C++ were impossible from a practical standpoint in VB.
Of course, things may have changed some in VB.net. But considering the fact that VB.net isn't even compatible with pervious VBs, I couldn't really care.
In Visual C++, to open a window takes about 104 lines of code if you estimate the number without doing any research like myself. In Visual Basic, you can open a window just by creating a new project and hitting 'Run'. It's easy, and that's why it works.
I remember getting into a debate with some kids about this in highschool. The next day, I'd produced a program that would bounce a ball around in a window in 30 lines of code.
By "squishing" the code down (although, with only one semicolon per line, outside of for loops) I was able to get it down to 23 lines. Keep in mind I was in highschool.
Anyway, if you want to see this for yourself, the source is up at http://autopr0n.com/23lines.cpp, and the complete VC5 (IIRC) is at http://autopr0n.com/23lines.zip
Oh, and looking over the comments, I still used windows messaging. If I wrote this code today, I'd probably be able to get it done with even less code.
but besides that, the core of the OS dosn't need to be very big, so you really can check everything.
A huge program in C++ will probably have tons of buffer overflows to exploit. A Large Java program will have ZERO overflows.
It's like comparing a hand grenade to an orange. Both can be handled safely, but an orange is just not going to blow up, no matter what you do, while the hand grenade has an increasing chance of exploding the more you fiddle with it.
If these functional languages can be compiled or even just run, then obviously they can be converted to imperative languages.
If the programs couldn't be run on imperative machines, what would be the point in writing programs in 'em.
In fact, Lisp is the orgional functional programming langauge.
Does the skill of the programmer prevail over the limitations of the language and paradigm used
:P
Well, yeah. I mean, duh.
Seriously though, while OCaml might have been a better language for the various problems, it should be possible to do it in C, assembly, PASCAL, whatever. It might not be a good idea but it can still be done.
If the second team had known and used OCaml, or some other OO language... or hell even Java or C++ they would have had an easier time. But it may have been that they wanted to give themselves a challenge, to prove that they could do what some could do in OCaml in plain C.
A while ago I was reading about how some proceduralist was complaining that these competitions weren't fair to non-functional coders. The argument made sense, but it shouldn't have been impossible to do the coding in a procedural language.
In fact, I was thinking of doing the contest in Visual basic, just for spite
How did the FBI catch this guy? I mean, actually catch him? Extradition? If so, then the Russian government agreed to allow him to be tried in the US.
If the Russian government felt that the FBI's crimes weren't very much of a big deal.
Besides Russia isn't exactly a bastion of civil liberties anyway, I'm willing to bet that Russian law enforcement breaks their own laws all the time.
What the FBI did may have been technicaly illigal, but you have to consider motives and damage as well. Buzz Aldrin didn't get prosicuted when he punched that moon-hoax guy in the face and he shouldn't have been.
Come on, Microsoft and bill gates have had bad terms associated with them at google for ages. Assuming that google changed this just for M$'s sake is ludicris.
If that was all they were worried about, they could simply have manually changed those searches to exclude MS (as they have done for people as small as Bernie Shiftman), that guy who spammed his resume around everywhere. Searches on his name would turn up pages bitching about him.)
Btw, you definitely deserve a +5 for plagiarizing this post verbatim. Well, except for the paragraph breaks, I guess.
Alltheweb works pretty well as a google alternative, and it has a better design too :)
Don't get the wrong idea, I like google, but having just one search engine that's commonly used is a bad idea. No other company can really compete due to the fact that google has so much traffic to sell ads on.
So anyway, that's why I pimp alltheweb whenever this topic comes up.
According to this Wired article, recent tweaks to Google's PageRank search algorithm have degraded rather than improved the accuracy of the results
Actualy, according to the artical, a few people who run blogs seem to think that google has been degraded, while google itself has not seen a higher number of actual complaints.
Basicaly what happened is that google took some mesures to reduce the effects of "googlebombing" by bloggers.
It dosn't cost much to play a song, but radio stations are required to pay small amounts of money for each song they play.
But, although it's illegal, record companies pay huge amounts of money (or 'payola') to get their songs played, so people hear them. It's a promotional thing.
Not every song is a payola song, though. It's just something that *can* happen.
Neither of these is worth paying much attention to: Congress is about to wrap up and go home for the year, and will start afresh in January with a clean slate. Perhaps in January some bright Congressperson will introduce a bill which actually takes strong steps toward repealing the DMCA.
Oh, thanks great god of everything. You are so much smarter then all of us, thanks for comming to our conclusions for us. Doing that is so much work.
Well first of all no one has any idea if this guy can actualy act. If he can't, he'll need to have a good director that can work around his lack of abity (cf. The Matrix).
But I doubt this will be any good. I used to watch MTV a lot, and all their movies, without fail, sucked.
God the onion is so lame these days. Dosn't everyone know that radio stations already pay for the music they play? (not much, (probably less then they were paid to play it, if they're a clear channel station) but still something)
The onion sucks now. And it's getting worse by the week.
It looks almost like it was designed as a lemosine or something, for carting around rich environmentalist actors :)
That this can go 190 miles an hour isn't really that impressive, especialy given that it probably has motors on all 8(?!) of it's wheels.
There are actualy a lot of niche electric cars for sale that will go pretty fast. Perhaps slashdot could look them up and do a comprehensive story.
Oh wait, that would require real work, nevermind...
You know, they have software that does your spelling for you know.
But yeah, I know what you mean, there is a huge difference in image quality between various monitors and video cards. I used to have a really nice Acer monitor (nice in image quality, anyway, not in it's ability to not fall apart...). I put a cheap S3 video card in there (after they got their 3d act together) and the fucking image rippled at high resolutions. It was ridiculous!
but when it's on a simple swab of paper, the only variable is the light source.
Yeah, obviously the color on a piece of paper is going to stay constant with constant light, but how do you propose to transfer that image without color loss in the 'analog' world? Obviously a lot of things are going to affect transfer from medium to medium. Probably more so then in the digital medium. After all, an image might look different on different monitors, but the data stays exactly the same.
Btw, this is kind of an annoyance of mine, what's' the deal with calling film cameras 'analog'? They don't use analog electrical signals, a more proper term would be "optical", "Chemical" or even "photographic". Chemical would probably be the best term, since photographic is kind of generic.
Anyway, electro-analog images are terrible at color correction, there's a reason people call NTSC (our analog TV standard) Never Twice the Same Color. And even if it did have good color correction, we are certainly not about to start using NTSC or some other analog image format with our digital cellphones!