> Javascript really shouldn't be a basic requirement just to load a page
That's one of my main gripes with Slashdot's "mobile site": it's not a website at all, it's a shitty Javascript application.
Why did they waste money on something like this, instead of making a new responsive css for the existing website, is a mystery.
The real summary should have been: Google switches alignment, from Good or Neutral to Lawful.
The old motto "Don't be evil" clearly suggests a Good or Neutral alignment, whether lawful or chaotic.
The new one, "Do the right thing," implies a Lawful alignment. But that could be Good, Neutral, or Evil.
Considering that one possible Lawful Evil charachter is the archetipal Overlord, who values power over all else and uses the law to maintain control, I'd say we have a match. Darth Vader and the Emperor he served had this alignment.
I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.
Russian programmers and hackers are famous for being extremely smart. This is also a fame your fellow countryman hold from Chess tournaments and other competitions of the mind.
In your opinion:
Is this true?
If so, is it a case of the crème de la crème, say the top 20 best Russian hackers, being much smarter than the top 20 hackers from the rest of the world? Or is it a case of there being many more smart people in general in Russia, compared to other countries?
If true, would you attribute it to genetics or to education? Or both?
How are Russian universities, compared to American and European ones?
Some "real world" programming languages already have that feature. The foremost is Objective C, widely used for programming Apple products, which I believe inherited it from Smalltalk. Compare this Objective C fragment:
A singular feature of Objective C, as compared with other languages, is that the method signature is composed of all the intermediate words (adverbs or prepositions) in that particular order. For example the method above is referred to as colorWithRed:green:blue:alpha. You must use them in the same order, otherwise you get a compilation error, because you might be invoking an entirely different method. This is consistent with subject-predicate usage in natural languages, where "tell X by Y to Z" may be different from "tell X to Y by Z"
Other languages, mainly dynamic ones (Python, Groovy, etc.) take a hybrid approach, where you can pass named parameters, but their presence or ordering is not taken into account when choosing which method to invoke. Some of them (Groovy) allow the programmer to give meaning to the position of the arguments, when needed, while others don't.
There is a reasonable explanation, which you are failing to see. If LG employees were instructed to destroyed Samsung property by their employer, and if at some level LG personnel was dumb enough to write it down in an email or in a memo, police can find the evidence by raiding their Seoul offices, which is exactly what they did.
The reality is that for every 1 person who creates or gets their hands on some interesting content worth of sharing AND which is not already shared AND has the will, time and knowledge to do it properly, there are 10^N people who just want to fetch something that is already out there.
ISOHunt was a fine and very useful service, while it lasted.
Oh but robots did create massive unemployment. Now there are millions, soon to be billions of people out of work, who can play tennis and soccer all day long.
Except they have no food, nor clothes, nor shelter. There are people called "owners" that keep all the food and clothes and shelter produced by the robots, unless you give them something they need in exchange. Which of course you cannot do, because there's nothing you have that they might need, not even your body—unless you are an attractive female, or they need one of your organs. There are already poor people selling their organs to buy food for their families.
That is quite simply what's wrong with the picture. Owners.
Our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it.
Wrong. A trajectory going into a singularity has nothing to do with the trajectory going out of it—if any is even taken.
The definition of a singularity is a point where a mathematical formula is not defined. Except for the case of removable singularities, any derivatives are also undefined. So if your model ends up at a singularity, your math is simply not up to the task of describing what happens next.
Around an essential singularity, the most interesting and worrisome kind, the formula takes every possible value, infinitely many times. You can approach the singularity from any value and exit with any other value. So "at" the singularity, the formula is even less defined than in a regular "oh noes I divided by zero" kind, where at least you know the value to be infinitely large.
I realize that, by Occam's razor, the journalist may not even know what a singularity is and just threw the word around because it's cool. Sigh.
Consider learning an "executable mathematical notation" such as APL.
It has the advantage of looking like math formulas, naming entire matrices with a single letter and using symbols for the operations, while avoiding the pitfalls and chores of traditional programming languages, such as explicit loops.
APL was designed to allow non-programmers to express complex computations with ease, in a non-ambiguous, reproducible, executable way.
There are excellent commercial implementations (with trial or free-for-personal-use versions) such as AplX and Dyalog. They both have good tutorials. There is even a Try APL online site http://www.tryapl.org/
I'm among those who set their computers and gadgets to English the moment I get my hands on them, among the consternation of friends and family.
But I can attest to the fact that a LOT of programmers don't speak a word of English. They have learned the CS meanings of a few dozen words, but that's as far as they go.
They may know that 'this' refers to the current object in OO programming, but they have no clue how to pronounce it (I have heard things you humans...) let alone that it means 'this' as opposed to 'that.'
They know 'Windows' is the name of the most widely used OS, as most programmers clearly understand what an OS is. But if they came to your house and you asked them to open the windows, they would probably walk to your PC, not to the walls.
So there you go, developer tools need localization like everything else.
If anything, you must put EXTRA effort with developer tools, as opposed to generic software, to find and use the RIGHT translation. You wouldn't be very happy if your browser tool suddenly asked you to "gaze at the fountain" instead of "view the source", now would you?
> This whole business appears to be a Slash-vertisement.
Yes, because a substantial part of Slashdot's readership gets into trouble and needs to do community service on a regular basis. I can totally identify with the "bad boy" on that front page.
The money will always be in the "mainstream", or the particular mainstream of every place and time, by definition.
Megaupload exists because it makes money. It makes money because millions of people watch movies and download shit off it, not because it makes a few hackers "free" to share stuff.
No mainstream = no money = not *existing* in any noticeable capacity.
It is in fact slightly different than what was reported.
Three of Apple's registered companies in Italy have been fined not just for misleading customers about their two year state-mandated warranty terms, but for hampering access to warranty services after the one year mark.
Think of how most developers are using Javascript nowadays: it's a target language for their compilers.
Whether the source was Java (GWT compiler) or Javascript itself (YUI compressor, Google closure compiler) the fact remains that what browsers are given to run is not what the developers wrote. Which is standard practice in the software business (it's called compilation) and for good reasons.
Now, JS makes for a poor machine language. So we could either beat around the bush with an intermediate bytecode language (Java went there, and Python and all the others too, with varying results) or go for the real thing and come up with a good x86 sandboxing and code verification standard.
Remember, x86 is currently in use by 99% of desktop machines. When other architectures will gain momentum, websites will just offer two or more compiled versions of their code. In the mean time, they will just have to emulate or translate the x86 instruction set, a task for which a large open source code base has already been developed, and which would still be more efficient than parsing plain Javascript, by several orders of magnitude.
I can see how a successful person from one or two generations ago could fail 100% of it.
And I don't think such material should be requirement for everybody. People with other skill sets (social, artistic, etc.) should be recognized and valued too. The world needs musicians and clothes designers and yes, managers and salesmen, as much as we need good scientists and engineers.
Also, the just-in-time inventory fad where nobody actually stocks anything any more
I wouldn't call it a fad. With the current rate of technological advancement, where last-month products have already been made obsolete by some newer / better tech, I would call it sensible management.
Or maybe we should revise the decade-old HTTP protocol to better define the scope of cookies and of (misspelled) referrer headers. That is, until fingerprinting the clock skew becomes commonplace.
[the Windows key is] only used about once a month (or, in my case, not even that)
What!?
I might not be using Windows anymore, but I clearly remember at the time when it was my primary OS I would constantly hit the Windows key! Heck, Win+E must have been the single most useful key shortcut on that whole toy OS!
Slashdot Mirror
See? Trying to format a comment on this thing is just hopeless.
> Javascript really shouldn't be a basic requirement just to load a page That's one of my main gripes with Slashdot's "mobile site": it's not a website at all, it's a shitty Javascript application. Why did they waste money on something like this, instead of making a new responsive css for the existing website, is a mystery.
The real summary should have been: Google switches alignment, from Good or Neutral to Lawful. The old motto "Don't be evil" clearly suggests a Good or Neutral alignment, whether lawful or chaotic. The new one, "Do the right thing," implies a Lawful alignment. But that could be Good, Neutral, or Evil. Considering that one possible Lawful Evil charachter is the archetipal Overlord, who values power over all else and uses the law to maintain control, I'd say we have a match. Darth Vader and the Emperor he served had this alignment. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.
If wee keep burning shit at the current rate for another 10 or 20 years, we are game, say the most recent researches.
But hey, none of those politicians will be in office by then, not even halfway or a quarter of the way by then, so who cares!
Here's the actual report in case anyone is interested.
Russian programmers and hackers are famous for being extremely smart. This is also a fame your fellow countryman hold from Chess tournaments and other competitions of the mind.
In your opinion:
Thanks
Some "real world" programming languages already have that feature. The foremost is Objective C, widely used for programming Apple products, which I believe inherited it from Smalltalk. Compare this Objective C fragment:
myColor = [UIColor colorWithRed: 127 green:127 blue:127 alpha:1];
with the equivalent Java code:
myColor = new Color(127, 127, 127, 255);
A singular feature of Objective C, as compared with other languages, is that the method signature is composed of all the intermediate words (adverbs or prepositions) in that particular order. For example the method above is referred to as colorWithRed:green:blue:alpha. You must use them in the same order, otherwise you get a compilation error, because you might be invoking an entirely different method. This is consistent with subject-predicate usage in natural languages, where "tell X by Y to Z" may be different from "tell X to Y by Z"
Other languages, mainly dynamic ones (Python, Groovy, etc.) take a hybrid approach, where you can pass named parameters, but their presence or ordering is not taken into account when choosing which method to invoke. Some of them (Groovy) allow the programmer to give meaning to the position of the arguments, when needed, while others don't.
There is a reasonable explanation, which you are failing to see. If LG employees were instructed to destroyed Samsung property by their employer, and if at some level LG personnel was dumb enough to write it down in an email or in a memo, police can find the evidence by raiding their Seoul offices, which is exactly what they did.
Besides, anybody who thinks a cordless vacuum can have the same power of a corded one, deserves the raw deal he is going to get.
The reality is that for every 1 person who creates or gets their hands on some interesting content worth of sharing AND which is not already shared AND has the will, time and knowledge to do it properly, there are 10^N people who just want to fetch something that is already out there.
ISOHunt was a fine and very useful service, while it lasted.
Oh but robots did create massive unemployment. Now there are millions, soon to be billions of people out of work, who can play tennis and soccer all day long.
Except they have no food, nor clothes, nor shelter. There are people called "owners" that keep all the food and clothes and shelter produced by the robots, unless you give them something they need in exchange. Which of course you cannot do, because there's nothing you have that they might need, not even your body—unless you are an attractive female, or they need one of your organs. There are already poor people selling their organs to buy food for their families.
That is quite simply what's wrong with the picture. Owners.
Wrong. A trajectory going into a singularity has nothing to do with the trajectory going out of it—if any is even taken.
The definition of a singularity is a point where a mathematical formula is not defined. Except for the case of removable singularities, any derivatives are also undefined. So if your model ends up at a singularity, your math is simply not up to the task of describing what happens next.
Around an essential singularity, the most interesting and worrisome kind, the formula takes every possible value, infinitely many times. You can approach the singularity from any value and exit with any other value. So "at" the singularity, the formula is even less defined than in a regular "oh noes I divided by zero" kind, where at least you know the value to be infinitely large.
I realize that, by Occam's razor, the journalist may not even know what a singularity is and just threw the word around because it's cool. Sigh.
Consider learning an "executable mathematical notation" such as APL.
It has the advantage of looking like math formulas, naming entire matrices with a single letter and using symbols for the operations, while avoiding the pitfalls and chores of traditional programming languages, such as explicit loops.
APL was designed to allow non-programmers to express complex computations with ease, in a non-ambiguous, reproducible, executable way.
There are excellent commercial implementations (with trial or free-for-personal-use versions) such as AplX and Dyalog. They both have good tutorials. There is even a Try APL online site http://www.tryapl.org/
I'm among those who set their computers and gadgets to English the moment I get my hands on them, among the consternation of friends and family.
But I can attest to the fact that a LOT of programmers don't speak a word of English. They have learned the CS meanings of a few dozen words, but that's as far as they go.
They may know that 'this' refers to the current object in OO programming, but they have no clue how to pronounce it (I have heard things you humans...) let alone that it means 'this' as opposed to 'that.'
They know 'Windows' is the name of the most widely used OS, as most programmers clearly understand what an OS is. But if they came to your house and you asked them to open the windows, they would probably walk to your PC, not to the walls.
So there you go, developer tools need localization like everything else.
If anything, you must put EXTRA effort with developer tools, as opposed to generic software, to find and use the RIGHT translation. You wouldn't be very happy if your browser tool suddenly asked you to "gaze at the fountain" instead of "view the source", now would you?
> This whole business appears to be a Slash-vertisement.
Yes, because a substantial part of Slashdot's readership gets into trouble and needs to do community service on a regular basis. I can totally identify with the "bad boy" on that front page.
The money will always be in the "mainstream", or the particular mainstream of every place and time, by definition.
Megaupload exists because it makes money. It makes money because millions of people watch movies and download shit off it, not because it makes a few hackers "free" to share stuff.
No mainstream = no money = not *existing* in any noticeable capacity.
It is in fact slightly different than what was reported.
Three of Apple's registered companies in Italy have been fined not just for misleading customers about their two year state-mandated warranty terms, but for hampering access to warranty services after the one year mark.
Official press release (in Italian)
Think of how most developers are using Javascript nowadays: it's a target language for their compilers.
Whether the source was Java (GWT compiler) or Javascript itself (YUI compressor, Google closure compiler) the fact remains that what browsers are given to run is not what the developers wrote. Which is standard practice in the software business (it's called compilation) and for good reasons.
Now, JS makes for a poor machine language. So we could either beat around the bush with an intermediate bytecode language (Java went there, and Python and all the others too, with varying results) or go for the real thing and come up with a good x86 sandboxing and code verification standard.
Remember, x86 is currently in use by 99% of desktop machines. When other architectures will gain momentum, websites will just offer two or more compiled versions of their code. In the mean time, they will just have to emulate or translate the x86 instruction set, a task for which a large open source code base has already been developed, and which would still be more efficient than parsing plain Javascript, by several orders of magnitude.
So what's the problem with that, again?
This is the 10th grade math course.
I can see how a successful person from one or two generations ago could fail 100% of it.
And I don't think such material should be requirement for everybody. People with other skill sets (social, artistic, etc.) should be recognized and valued too. The world needs musicians and clothes designers and yes, managers and salesmen, as much as we need good scientists and engineers.
Why is this modded funny at all? Have you kids seriously never used a computer without a hard drive? IBM PC? Amiga? Not even a Commodore 64? Come on!
Also, the just-in-time inventory fad where nobody actually stocks anything any more
I wouldn't call it a fad. With the current rate of technological advancement, where last-month products have already been made obsolete by some newer / better tech, I would call it sensible management.
Or maybe we should revise the decade-old HTTP protocol to better define the scope of cookies and of (misspelled) referrer headers.
That is, until fingerprinting the clock skew becomes commonplace.
To further increase their safety, we also limit the units to 6 miles per hour.
What? You only give them the 6 mph key?
Man, this is lame... I WANT MY DAMN RED KEY!
What!?
I might not be using Windows anymore, but I clearly remember at the time when it was my primary OS I would constantly hit the Windows key! Heck, Win+E must have been the single most useful key shortcut on that whole toy OS!
It ain't funny, no matter what point of view.
It's very sad indeed.