I'm not defending perl as the best language. But were talking about a starter language replacement for basic, and perl is super good for that.
Of all the O'reily pocket referecne books perl, is the shortest. Moreover the core language is not evolving and it can do an awful lot, very easily before you import any libraries. The same can't be said of any other language I know of.
It ubiquitously installed, and there is no compilation environment issue, or library linking. It's portable across machines. And it's machine model is pretty rich so you can interact with the OS very well.
PLus it's very easy to learn.
So I would say perl is the best BASIC replacement for starting programming.
Perl also happens to be one of the very best languages to learn HOW object oriented programming works. It's actually very brutal to do object oriented programming but it is the best one I know of to see how objects hold date, resolve inheritance, psedohash, or introspect. Other languages do all that but they hide it so well you don't have a good understanding of how they do it until you
After that I would reccomend python when it comes time to write re-usuable programms and modules.
My guess would be that native plug-ins will always be more efficient on power than java script interpreted code. Not sure where exactly flash lies in that spectrum. It's a power hog compared to most apps but but my guess is flash has a lot of high level functionality running natively (audio and video) with just the command and control being in the flash language.
Google announced today that to avoid lawsuits from apple over the app store name and to better describe the products offered, they are changing the name to the "malware market". They were immediately sued by Microsoft who claim to have copyrighted malware infected operating systems.
Low level languages like C++ are highly optimized for the current computing environment. But they are hard to program. The future belongs to programming environments that are. 1) hard for a programmer to understand because they are data flow or multi-processing or highly data-local (cache optimized) or syncronous (GPU).
2) the environment may be unknown or variable not fixed. you may not know where your program will be executing from day to day or what the specs of the machine are.
Languages good at this don't exist yet. And we have not even begun to tap functional programming's potential.
The other problem with C++ is it's very easy to make logical errors in.
Thought about that. But the lack of flash means whe can't listen to all her favorite gurus. And can you really have an ipad without having any other computer around? I heard IOS5 is supposed to address that but I'm skeptical.
I've been looking at snagging a chromebook for my mom, but I hate to not get an apple. And sometimes you want to do a bit more than what a chromebook can do. Sometimes I actually need to use the computer too. But 99.9% of the time everything else gets in my mom's way and confuse the hell out of her. after 20 years she still does not know what it means to "quit" an application. the concept is unlearnable. But she can use a browser and web mail and even write a document.
Now if only it would just boot to chrome then it would the best of all possible worlds.
iCloud communications sells VOIP. apple sells iphones that sync in the icloud. Are these different market segments? If apple makes that argument, like they did initially with apple records then perhaps apple will not be allowed to sell VOIP down the road, or will have to remove all voip or skype apps from the app store.
As far as subsidiary confusion goes that does not work against icloud.
- 1 checking your DNA is as cheap as checking the validity of a bitcoin - 2 you can actually transfer poocoin through the internet
1: you don't have to check it. That's what the Poo Reserve Holding company does. And since it's the same DNA it won't be hard to assay it for unique SNPs. It's not like sequencing it.
2: You trade it the signed electronic certs not poo. For that you just use PooPal.com
Bitcoins are more convenient than trading sacks of shit. And they happen to be more convenient than trading dollars too. So I really hope that Bitcoin can be given a chance as a currency. It would be great for my business (100% freelance online developer.)
How is bitvoin any less easily transacted than the electronically traded poocoin? Or Excahnge traded goldshares?
I Now if you ask me, I will stick to real value like dollars which is the natural measure of Man and all his works.
I'm now selling my poo as a currency. Like bit coin it can only be mined at a steady rate so it can't be manipulated. My Poo is marked with my DNA so it can't be forged for less than it costs to make. It's Natural, and a work of Man.
Now rather than transport it to you in all it's glory, I have established a Poo Reserve. The Poo holding company issues signed electronic Goombah Poo Reserve Demand notes ("poocoin") backed, as gold once backed the dollar, with Poo, redeemable on demand of actual Poo.
I am also setting up the first Poo National Bank. The bank will accept deposits of your electronic Poo Demand notes. It even pays interest on your deposits.
The Bank will also manke loans against it's deposits. So you can take out a loan at a very modest interest rate, all payable in Poo Demand Notes.
What happens next is easy to anticipate. People will Borrow Poocoin and pay off their debts for goods and services. The people paid off, will naturally want to earn some interest so they will pretty much all deposit the poocoin back in the bank to get that interest rate until they need to spend it on something. IN the mean time, with all those fresh deposits, the bank can now make new loans.
After a time T, the total poocoin deposited in the bank has now doubled. The total amount of Poo has not doubled. But what has happened is there are the Liabilities (Deposited Poocoin) and the Assets (borrowed poo coin), that cancel allowing the effective amount of Poocoin in circulation to have doubled.
And pretty much every time T after that the assets and liabilities both grow by the same amount. forever. the BM2 money supply grows without bound even the BM1 amount of the intiall Poocoin the bank had has not changed.
Everything is fine unless of course too many of the people want to withdraw their deposits at the same time. Then unless all the loans can both be called and people can pay them instantly, there is a collapse.
Just like bitcoin but more natural and actually backed by something real and tangible, not "electronic work". You can redeem poocoin for manure but you can't redeem bitcoin for anything.
I'm unsure what your point is. Apple of course wants to monetize the cloud and if they don't have some "lock in" then they can't support a low cost of entry. It's not a new idea. Give away the shavers and sell the blades, as it were. Apple has always sold ecosystems more than individual things. So it's hardly worth damning them for that. You certainly do get what you pay for when you buy apple. I get a total laugh everytime I see some dope try to argue that a dell with "simmilar features" is less expensive. it might well be, but then there's that whole "just works" ecosystem that isn't costed in. The whole flop of all the cheap Android tablets sort of makes it really clear.
Apple's sync cloud seems like a pretty good value. I certainly waste more than $25 of my time every year fucking around trying to keep devices synced. If they can fix that and I can just count on it working then I'm certainly going to go that way rather than screw around experimenting with some cheaper solution that is "just as good" (or maybe not). What I want is reliable and good enough, not some overly tricky unreliable solution.
Of course the cost of that decision is that I will very likely predicate my future device purchases on how well they work with the devices i've already invested in. So it's the whole ecosytem lock in.
Milo Minderbinder would be proud. We all win, especially Milo.
Oracle is really clear on its java lic. Anyone can write java but not everyone can write a JVM. Dalveck is just that. so it infringes. I can't see why the argument would last more than a minute.
I agree that Zotero is awesome. I just wish it wasn't tied so closely to Firefox.
there is an alpha stand alone version of zotero now but that's not what I really want. it's one that works will all browsers and shares a common database.
But my major gripe with Zotero is that it does not work with Pages.app. The zotero folks seem to get inexplicably indignant when asked why they don't support footnotes in pages.app (other than the useless RTF conversion method). They say it's because there is no public API, but any doofus can examine the XML and it's obvious how to extend it from a few minutes contemplation. it would be perfectly simple to add new tags that contained the footnotes. I've actually test that for other reasons so I know it can be done from a syntactic point of view. It's the integration of that into Zotero that is beyond me. I wish they didn't have a Stallmanesque purity test for their extensions. After all they support MS Word.
So i struggle on with the lameness of endnote. And zotero goes unused despite being a better approach.
Would you shell out the $3500 to get Mac OS X? The way I see it, that is the choice you will have in the near future: iOS for a "consumer" level computer, and Mac OS X for high end "professional" level computers.
And what if the choice was a tablet included a virtual OSX desktop in the cloud for $100/year with no need to buy or install any software updates.
You could just have an iOS app or web interface to a virtual desktop in the cloud. That would be essentially like the sunray system only on a more versatile appliance platform.
No need to actually have the desktop running on the desktop except for cases where you had to run off line or high throughput graphics had a latency issue.
Perhaps the community needs to think about copyrighting just about every conceivable human joint movement for the control of an electronic interface. Then licence this under the GPL such that if any gesture is incorporated into an interface then every gesture used in the interface must be made available under the GPL.
instead of getting into a cat and mouse game it would be more useful to improve existing open source VOIP clients so Skype can be replaced altogether.
I find it hard to understand why people use skype at all when there are plenty of good voip providers. Skype has completely random call quality/ you never iknow if a connection will be fine or sound like it in an echo chamber or have a buzz. You can get excellent voip service for $5 to $10/month. Indeed Ooma offers FREE service (but requires you to purchase a $130 appliance and pay the E911). Ooma's quality is excellent their service is responsive and it keeps getting better (HD voice now available for ooma-to-ooma).
There are lots of quality VOIP providers. Why would anyone put up with low quality skype?
This makes all those laments about the walled garden seem hollow. Apple set up a system that specifically allows developers not to have to worry about e-commerce, or patents and copyrights. Sure it takes a cut, but as we can now see this may be worth it. It sure is to small developers.
All the poor chumps on Cydia now have Lodsys to contend with.
The proper place to put your wrath is on the asshole patent trolls that force the world to work like this.
The down side to this action by apple is that it re-inforces lodsys. that is it slams the door on future people who want to open marketplaces for apps or market apps outside of the concecrated marketplaces. By re-onforcing lodsys it is going to make the fee they charge higher for all the late arrivals who exists outside the apple-amazon-google tri-lateral markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Coalgas is what you get when you break down coal to things like hydrogen and water and co. you can run anything on that gas. No need for a fuel cell.
I'm not defending perl as the best language. But were talking about a starter language replacement for basic, and perl is super good for that.
Of all the O'reily pocket referecne books perl, is the shortest. Moreover the core language is not evolving and it can do an awful lot, very easily before you import any libraries. The same can't be said of any other language I know of.
It ubiquitously installed, and there is no compilation environment issue, or library linking. It's portable across machines. And it's machine model is pretty rich so you can interact with the OS very well.
PLus it's very easy to learn.
So I would say perl is the best BASIC replacement for starting programming.
Perl also happens to be one of the very best languages to learn HOW object oriented programming works. It's actually very brutal to do object oriented programming but it is the best one I know of to see how objects hold date, resolve inheritance, psedohash, or introspect. Other languages do all that but they hide it so well you don't have a good understanding of how they do it until you
After that I would reccomend python when it comes time to write re-usuable programms and modules.
My guess would be that native plug-ins will always be more efficient on power than java script interpreted code. Not sure where exactly flash lies in that spectrum. It's a power hog compared to most apps but but my guess is flash has a lot of high level functionality running natively (audio and video) with just the command and control being in the flash language.
One can see this coming, Iceland will shortly be renamed to colbert-land.
Google announced today that to avoid lawsuits from apple over the app store name and to better describe the products offered, they are changing the name to the "malware market". They were immediately sued by Microsoft who claim to have copyrighted malware infected operating systems.
Low level languages like C++ are highly optimized for the current computing environment. But they are hard to program. The future belongs to programming environments that are.
1) hard for a programmer to understand because they are data flow or multi-processing or highly data-local (cache optimized) or syncronous (GPU).
2) the environment may be unknown or variable not fixed. you may not know where your program will be executing from day to day or what the specs of the machine are.
Languages good at this don't exist yet. And we have not even begun to tap functional programming's potential.
The other problem with C++ is it's very easy to make logical errors in.
Thought about that. But the lack of flash means whe can't listen to all her favorite gurus. And can you really have an ipad without having any other computer around? I heard IOS5 is supposed to address that but I'm skeptical.
I've been looking at snagging a chromebook for my mom, but I hate to not get an apple. And sometimes you want to do a bit more than what a chromebook can do. Sometimes I actually need to use the computer too. But 99.9% of the time everything else gets in my mom's way and confuse the hell out of her. after 20 years she still does not know what it means to "quit" an application. the concept is unlearnable. But she can use a browser and web mail and even write a document.
Now if only it would just boot to chrome then it would the best of all possible worlds.
if the lights are out, how do I find my cell phone to turn them on.
iCloud communications sells VOIP. apple sells iphones that sync in the icloud. Are these different market segments? If apple makes that argument, like they did initially with apple records then perhaps apple will not be allowed to sell VOIP down the road, or will have to remove all voip or skype apps from the app store.
As far as subsidiary confusion goes that does not work against icloud.
Notify me when:
- 1 checking your DNA is as cheap as checking the validity of a bitcoin
- 2 you can actually transfer poocoin through the internet
1: you don't have to check it. That's what the Poo Reserve Holding company does. And since it's the same DNA it won't be hard to assay it for unique SNPs. It's not like sequencing it.
2: You trade it the signed electronic certs not poo. For that you just use PooPal.com
Bitcoins are more convenient than trading sacks of shit. And they happen to be more convenient than trading dollars too. So I really hope that Bitcoin can be given a chance as a currency. It would be great for my business (100% freelance online developer.)
How is bitvoin any less easily transacted than the electronically traded poocoin? Or Excahnge traded goldshares?
Send me your paypal address and I'll invoice you for a baggie. I'm going to toss in a free bag of mucous for the first 1000 customers, so don't delay.
I Now if you ask me, I will stick to real value like dollars which is the natural measure of Man and all his works.
I'm now selling my poo as a currency. Like bit coin it can only be mined at a steady rate so it can't be manipulated. My Poo is marked with my DNA so it can't be forged for less than it costs to make. It's Natural, and a work of Man.
Now rather than transport it to you in all it's glory, I have established a Poo Reserve. The Poo holding company issues signed electronic Goombah Poo Reserve Demand notes ("poocoin") backed, as gold once backed the dollar, with Poo, redeemable on demand of actual Poo.
I am also setting up the first Poo National Bank. The bank will accept deposits of your electronic Poo Demand notes. It even pays interest on your deposits.
The Bank will also manke loans against it's deposits. So you can take out a loan at a very modest interest rate, all payable in Poo Demand Notes.
What happens next is easy to anticipate. People will Borrow Poocoin and pay off their debts for goods and services. The people paid off, will naturally want to earn some interest so they will pretty much all deposit the poocoin back in the bank to get that interest rate until they need to spend it on something. IN the mean time, with all those fresh deposits, the bank can now make new loans.
After a time T, the total poocoin deposited in the bank has now doubled. The total amount of Poo has not doubled. But what has happened is there are the Liabilities (Deposited Poocoin) and the Assets (borrowed poo coin), that cancel allowing the effective amount of Poocoin in circulation to have doubled.
And pretty much every time T after that the assets and liabilities both grow by the same amount. forever. the BM2 money supply grows without bound even the BM1 amount of the intiall Poocoin the bank had has not changed.
Everything is fine unless of course too many of the people want to withdraw their deposits at the same time. Then unless all the loans can both be called and people can pay them instantly, there is a collapse.
Just like bitcoin but more natural and actually backed by something real and tangible, not "electronic work". You can redeem poocoin for manure but you can't redeem bitcoin for anything.
Apple's OS and Apps use XML out the wazzu. this could be interesting.
I'm unsure what your point is. Apple of course wants to monetize the cloud and if they don't have some "lock in" then they can't support a low cost of entry. It's not a new idea. Give away the shavers and sell the blades, as it were. Apple has always sold ecosystems more than individual things. So it's hardly worth damning them for that. You certainly do get what you pay for when you buy apple. I get a total laugh everytime I see some dope try to argue that a dell with "simmilar features" is less expensive. it might well be, but then there's that whole "just works" ecosystem that isn't costed in. The whole flop of all the cheap Android tablets sort of makes it really clear.
Apple's sync cloud seems like a pretty good value. I certainly waste more than $25 of my time every year fucking around trying to keep devices synced. If they can fix that and I can just count on it working then I'm certainly going to go that way rather than screw around experimenting with some cheaper solution that is "just as good" (or maybe not). What I want is reliable and good enough, not some overly tricky unreliable solution.
Of course the cost of that decision is that I will very likely predicate my future device purchases on how well they work with the devices i've already invested in. So it's the whole ecosytem lock in.
Milo Minderbinder would be proud. We all win, especially Milo.
Oracle is really clear on its java lic. Anyone can write java but not everyone can write a JVM. Dalveck is just that. so it infringes. I can't see why the argument would last more than a minute.
I agree that Zotero is awesome. I just wish it wasn't tied so closely to Firefox.
there is an alpha stand alone version of zotero now but that's not what I really want. it's one that works will all browsers and shares a common database.
But my major gripe with Zotero is that it does not work with Pages.app. The zotero folks seem to get inexplicably indignant when asked why they don't support footnotes in pages.app (other than the useless RTF conversion method). They say it's because there is no public API, but any doofus can examine the XML and it's obvious how to extend it from a few minutes contemplation. it would be perfectly simple to add new tags that contained the footnotes. I've actually test that for other reasons so I know it can be done from a syntactic point of view. It's the integration of that into Zotero that is beyond me. I wish they didn't have a Stallmanesque purity test for their extensions. After all they support MS Word.
So i struggle on with the lameness of endnote. And zotero goes unused despite being a better approach.
What if Apple gave you the following choice:
Would you shell out the $3500 to get Mac OS X? The way I see it, that is the choice you will have in the near future: iOS for a "consumer" level computer, and Mac OS X for high end "professional" level computers.
And what if the choice was a tablet included a virtual OSX desktop in the cloud for $100/year with no need to buy or install any software updates.
You could just have an iOS app or web interface to a virtual desktop in the cloud. That would be essentially like the sunray system only on a more versatile appliance platform.
No need to actually have the desktop running on the desktop except for cases where you had to run off line or high throughput graphics had a latency issue.
Perhaps the community needs to think about copyrighting just about every conceivable human joint movement for the control of an electronic interface. Then licence this under the GPL such that if any gesture is incorporated into an interface then every gesture used in the interface must be made available under the GPL.
instead of getting into a cat and mouse game it would be more useful to improve existing open source VOIP clients so Skype can be replaced altogether.
I find it hard to understand why people use skype at all when there are plenty of good voip providers. Skype has completely random call quality/ you never iknow if a connection will be fine or sound like it in an echo chamber or have a buzz. You can get excellent voip service for $5 to $10 /month. Indeed Ooma offers FREE service (but requires you to purchase a $130 appliance and pay the E911). Ooma's quality is excellent their service is responsive and it keeps getting better (HD voice now available for ooma-to-ooma).
There are lots of quality VOIP providers. Why would anyone put up with low quality skype?
It turns out it just makes soft serve ice cream and keeps printing out the number 42.
If you are a scientist, this is just priceless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0
tip: notice what the costumes are made out of.
This makes all those laments about the walled garden seem hollow. Apple set up a system that specifically allows developers not to have to worry about e-commerce, or patents and copyrights. Sure it takes a cut, but as we can now see this may be worth it. It sure is to small developers.
All the poor chumps on Cydia now have Lodsys to contend with.
The proper place to put your wrath is on the asshole patent trolls that force the world to work like this.
The down side to this action by apple is that it re-inforces lodsys. that is it slams the door on future people who want to open marketplaces for apps or market apps outside of the concecrated marketplaces. By re-onforcing lodsys it is going to make the fee they charge higher for all the late arrivals who exists outside the apple-amazon-google tri-lateral markets.