I think this whole blog thing is getting way out of hand. Who cares that much about someone else life? Most people can't even care for themselves...why should you be worrying about checking out the latest cell phone picture with a story about how the line at McDonalds is too long. Gimme a break.
Inserts take way too long, as they require recopying the whole document manually. It's also considered a Hard Problem (i.e. something not bundled with a scanner) to OCR handwritten text.
Nah, when those who grow up on word processors try to write by hand they encounter these problems. To write by hand you first Think. Having Thought, you then know what to Write. It's pretty easy to circle sections and draw arrows, write notes in the margin, insert references to other pages. And the best writing is rewriting. Not a bad solution when the small 'n simple WP is less than feasible.
Or for $20 get a Palm V + keyboard on eBay.
Oh yeah, this reminds me... I'd like a tablet computer, a super hi res, pen based tablet... but with NO HWR! gawd. am I the only one who can't stand hand writing recognition? I want my scribbles. I like my scribbles. I scribble far more than mere letters, words, and paragraphs. But it'd be nice for those scribbles to be vector objects so they're reasonably printable.
What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.
Well. You can still find them on 16mm probably. Then you could restore them yourself. It'd be fun! Or not: project that old stuff the good old way. No digital artifacts. We have boxes of short subjects from the 1940s. The projector comes out about every ten years. they are amazing!
Of course, the media has promptly taken things one step further and suggested that "Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy". Perhaps this is true - but that might be reading more into the report than is good for it.
Short people, if they switch to being tall, can improve their chances of having tall children.
Engineers aren't in their profession by accidentally not becoming nurses or teachers. I would have to state with fair certainty that one who becomes a nurse is probably - on the average, or even in the majority of cases - not of an engineering mind, personality, etc. And the reverse. The profession, statistically, would likely be an indicator of personality type in these rather extreme cases of the nurse versus the engineer. I know several nurses and teachers and a lot of engineers. They are rather opposites. The idea of the nurses or music teachers I know "switching" to engineering is flat-out absurd. While I won't rule out the possibility of the contribution of the professional environment to the children's sex determination, how deep the correlation goes is unknown. But it seems to me that statistically, the profession is only evidence of something far, far deeper.
Whatever you do, give energy consumption some weight in the comparison. In this day and age, low energy requirements is a virtue. In other words, for two CPUs that are otherwise equivalent, the one which consumes lower energy ought to win.
No, no, no! They are nothing like each other. If you look at the diagrams, you'll see that the Longhorn graphics pipelines run from top to bottom, whereas the Mac OS X graphics pipelines run left to right.
They're orthogonal to each other...
That's interesting, I haven't seen both diagrams. So what you're suggesting, perhaps, is that one is real and the other imaginary... makes sense, makes sense. Actually, on our traditional axes, that would make Apple's real and positive, and MS's imaginary and negative. ho ho!
You make some good points. It occurs to me as I read your post that someone who is confused by TigerDirect and Apple's Tiger is probably wondering why TigerDirect doesn't sell, you know, actual live Tigers... direct.
Did you hack hardware all through grade school? Did you start programming at age 10? Or did you decide to study something having to do with computers after a value-judgement analysis while in high school? You need to do what you love, or find out what you are naturally good at and either learn to love that or apply it to what you love.
Personally, I found hardware kind of interesting in college, but I understood that because I'd been programming since age 11, I would be a much better software person than hardware person. Whatever exposure I had to hardware was just a plus, but not a guiding decision.
Which reminds me. In 1993 (at Purdue) CS people were all pretty much dumpy geeks, whereas electrical engineering classes were evenly divided between goth-punks and buttoned down Land's End types. Perhaps that helps.
Perl inherited the splendor of sed, awk, etc. That's what it is. If you want to do anything besides text processing, you're going to write lots more perl than you would with a language that's created specifically for your task. In an ideal world.... the use of perl would be limited to exactly what it's great for - then it would have no need to become a beast and offer every feature under the sun. Same goes for every language... and in an ideal world, they could easily be combined. languages would not be monolithic entities, but one would work with task-specific features and syntax, yet sharing heap data and stack frames, etc.
Why on earth do we even have commenting? I mean, we went through the whole programming language concept precisely to make instructions to computers human-readable. Ideally, commenting should be obsolete - the language and its syntax should make it obvious what needs to be done.
This is true. Ideally, you're right. The answer to your question is that we use general-purpose programming languages. Special purpose programming languages let you use the minimum amount of code for the task, like, for instance, in applescript: tell application photoshop to print "my document". There ya go. Write that in C and you'll need a whole lotta comments. One of the ideas behind OO (from smalltalk) is that the protocol (interface) to an object, defined by its class, acts as a kind of lanugage to try and get your program statements closer to the actual problem. So write your code with that in mind. But still, it's far away. IN THE FUTURE... there may be easy ways to combine a hundred little special purpose languages that minimize the amount of management code, code that is not exactly for the problem at hand. This is no monumental failure of C or high level languages. It's just that they're general purpose.
A quote that has been attributed to steven wright: I went into a general store and they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.
Wow. When I read the headline, I instantly had flashbacks to Wesleyan Tetris. Did anyone else play this game back in the day on the Mac?
Yes, I played it, but even by 1993 it was nowhere to be found. That was when I got my first mac (color classic!) and man did I want that game. Even friends who'd had it couldn't find it. a MacHack entry, perhaps?
I remember back in the early 90's there was a version of Tetris for the MAC that would basically berrate you and taunt you and drop the occasional obscenity while you were playing.
Ugh, I remember that. It would say things like: You suck. and I hope your friends are watching....
I agree that it is irrelevant. I enjoy the idea that some (large?) percent of human conversations can be faked - it says more about human interaction than it does about machine intelligence.
This is endemic to all industries: ill-formed or ill-stated requirements.
Therefore, the challenge is to figure out how to build effectively with ill-stated requirements. It's hard. Hire some masterful people and manage them with wisdom.
Breeding a group of people who are convinced they're doing their thing for the world, yet who write anonymously behind the safety of a pseudonym or "Anonymous Coward" moniker?
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
Yeah. you could put the datacenter underwater in the north atlantic. powered by tidal generators. Wanted: experienced system and network administrator. Open water / extreme conditions diving experience a must.
The problem is that it was written by a journalist.
No revolution here.
SPIRAL is a generator for libraries of fast software implementations of linear signal processing transforms. These libraries are adapted to the computing platform and can be re-optimized as the hardware is upgraded or replaced....
Slashdot Mirror
I think this whole blog thing is getting way out of hand. Who cares that much about someone else life? Most people can't even care for themselves...why should you be worrying about checking out the latest cell phone picture with a story about how the line at McDonalds is too long. Gimme a break.
You're reading the wrong blogs. Here's a few:
http://defensetech.org/
http://www.back-to-iraq.com/
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://www.juancole.com/
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Inserts take way too long, as they require recopying the whole document manually. It's also considered a Hard Problem (i.e. something not bundled with a scanner) to OCR handwritten text.
Nah, when those who grow up on word processors try to write by hand they encounter these problems. To write by hand you first Think. Having Thought, you then know what to Write. It's pretty easy to circle sections and draw arrows, write notes in the margin, insert references to other pages. And the best writing is rewriting. Not a bad solution when the small 'n simple WP is less than feasible.
Or for $20 get a Palm V + keyboard on eBay.
Oh yeah, this reminds me... I'd like a tablet computer, a super hi res, pen based tablet... but with NO HWR! gawd. am I the only one who can't stand hand writing recognition? I want my scribbles. I like my scribbles. I scribble far more than mere letters, words, and paragraphs. But it'd be nice for those scribbles to be vector objects so they're reasonably printable.
What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.
Well. You can still find them on 16mm probably. Then you could restore them yourself. It'd be fun! Or not: project that old stuff the good old way. No digital artifacts. We have boxes of short subjects from the 1940s. The projector comes out about every ten years. they are amazing!
Of course, the media has promptly taken things one step further and suggested that "Couples desperate to produce a son could boost their chances if one or both of them switches to a "masculine" profession such as engineering or accountancy". Perhaps this is true - but that might be reading more into the report than is good for it.
Short people, if they switch to being tall, can improve their chances of having tall children.
Engineers aren't in their profession by accidentally not becoming nurses or teachers. I would have to state with fair certainty that one who becomes a nurse is probably - on the average, or even in the majority of cases - not of an engineering mind, personality, etc. And the reverse. The profession, statistically, would likely be an indicator of personality type in these rather extreme cases of the nurse versus the engineer. I know several nurses and teachers and a lot of engineers. They are rather opposites. The idea of the nurses or music teachers I know "switching" to engineering is flat-out absurd. While I won't rule out the possibility of the contribution of the professional environment to the children's sex determination, how deep the correlation goes is unknown. But it seems to me that statistically, the profession is only evidence of something far, far deeper.
The Pascal assignment operator :=
;-)
sure beats C's = any day of the week!
if assignment is your thing, baby
Now they should extend the "recycle" theme from Death to Reincarnation.
Whatever you do, give energy consumption some weight in the comparison. In this day and age, low energy requirements is a virtue. In other words, for two CPUs that are otherwise equivalent, the one which consumes lower energy ought to win.
No, no, no! They are nothing like each other. If you look at the diagrams, you'll see that the Longhorn graphics pipelines run from top to bottom, whereas the Mac OS X graphics pipelines run left to right.
They're orthogonal to each other...
That's interesting, I haven't seen both diagrams. So what you're suggesting, perhaps, is that one is real and the other imaginary... makes sense, makes sense. Actually, on our traditional axes, that would make Apple's real and positive, and MS's imaginary and negative. ho ho!
P.S.- Just ordered the Mini a few minutes ago.
Cool. Convertible?
You make some good points. It occurs to me as I read your post that someone who is confused by TigerDirect and Apple's Tiger is probably wondering why TigerDirect doesn't sell, you know, actual live Tigers... direct.
Did you hack hardware all through grade school? Did you start programming at age 10? Or did you decide to study something having to do with computers after a value-judgement analysis while in high school? You need to do what you love, or find out what you are naturally good at and either learn to love that or apply it to what you love.
Personally, I found hardware kind of interesting in college, but I understood that because I'd been programming since age 11, I would be a much better software person than hardware person. Whatever exposure I had to hardware was just a plus, but not a guiding decision.
Which reminds me. In 1993 (at Purdue) CS people were all pretty much dumpy geeks, whereas electrical engineering classes were evenly divided between goth-punks and buttoned down Land's End types. Perhaps that helps.
Sounds like Perl.
Didn't work.
Perl inherited the splendor of sed, awk, etc. That's what it is. If you want to do anything besides text processing, you're going to write lots more perl than you would with a language that's created specifically for your task. In an ideal world.... the use of perl would be limited to exactly what it's great for - then it would have no need to become a beast and offer every feature under the sun. Same goes for every language... and in an ideal world, they could easily be combined. languages would not be monolithic entities, but one would work with task-specific features and syntax, yet sharing heap data and stack frames, etc.
I agree that it doesn't work in perl.
Why on earth do we even have commenting? I mean, we went through the whole programming language concept precisely to make instructions to computers human-readable. Ideally, commenting should be obsolete - the language and its syntax should make it obvious what needs to be done.
This is true. Ideally, you're right. The answer to your question is that we use general-purpose programming languages. Special purpose programming languages let you use the minimum amount of code for the task, like, for instance, in applescript: tell application photoshop to print "my document". There ya go. Write that in C and you'll need a whole lotta comments. One of the ideas behind OO (from smalltalk) is that the protocol (interface) to an object, defined by its class, acts as a kind of lanugage to try and get your program statements closer to the actual problem. So write your code with that in mind. But still, it's far away. IN THE FUTURE... there may be easy ways to combine a hundred little special purpose languages that minimize the amount of management code, code that is not exactly for the problem at hand. This is no monumental failure of C or high level languages. It's just that they're general purpose.
A quote that has been attributed to steven wright: I went into a general store and they wouldn't let me buy anything specific.
Wow. When I read the headline, I instantly had flashbacks to Wesleyan Tetris. Did anyone else play this game back in the day on the Mac?
Yes, I played it, but even by 1993 it was nowhere to be found. That was when I got my first mac (color classic!) and man did I want that game. Even friends who'd had it couldn't find it. a MacHack entry, perhaps?
I remember back in the early 90's there was a version of Tetris for the MAC that would basically berrate you and taunt you and drop the occasional obscenity while you were playing.
Ugh, I remember that. It would say things like: You suck. and I hope your friends are watching....
I was in college then. good times.
Actually, they're describing their business model. Bad. Very bad.
Fresco. I thought it was dead when I looked into it in 1996.
I agree that it is irrelevant. I enjoy the idea that some (large?) percent of human conversations can be faked - it says more about human interaction than it does about machine intelligence.
K&R
This is endemic to all industries: ill-formed or ill-stated requirements.
Therefore, the challenge is to figure out how to build effectively with ill-stated requirements. It's hard. Hire some masterful people and manage them with wisdom.
Breeding a group of people who are convinced they're doing their thing for the world, yet who write anonymously behind the safety of a pseudonym or "Anonymous Coward" moniker?
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
I suppose you've never heard of the Federalist Papers.
Yeah. you could put the datacenter underwater in the north atlantic. powered by tidal generators. Wanted: experienced system and network administrator. Open water / extreme conditions diving experience a must.
and of course don't forget the I/O, from eyes to hands. learning requires a lot more than just a brain.
No revolution here.
Spiral: A Generator for Platform-Adapted Libraries of Signal Processing Alogorithms
I'd like to see a computing measurement unit for comparing how much energy it takes to perform those TFLOPS.