Indeed, there is, to my way of thinking, a fairly large difference between having a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, versus having the government actually *provide* you with them at taxpayer expense. The latter should only be the case if you need the weapon for government work because you are in the military, law enforcement, etc. Otherwise, I should think you ought to have to provide your *own* arms to keep and bear. That's how the right to keep and bear arms has always been understood in the past, if I'm not greatly mistaken.
Re:I don't know why this story's flagged "endofday
on
Python 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
I heard that Perl 6 is scheduled to be released in time for Christmas:-)
Besides, the _real_ end of days will be when Perl and Python and Ruby and Emacs are finally included in out-of-the-box Microsoft Windows installs.
> Government stimulus packages don't - because the money they hand out has to come from somewhere. > That somewhere is either additional money they tax away... or by "printing"
Actually, in the short term it's usually deficit spending. (This has its own set of economic consequences...) The idea, typically, is to make it up out of tax money later when the economy recovers. I'm not saying this is a *good* plan, but it's probably better than immediately raising taxes to stimulate the economy, to say nothing of printing extra currency (yikes!).
> Secondly, any government school system will always pale in comparison to > a private one because the government is terrible at managing anything.
It's worse than that. The government is bad at managing things, yes, but with public education, at least in the United States, there's an additional and much worse problem: the public schools are where the students go who have no motivation to be there or to learn. I don't just mean no *internal* motivation, either; it's actually the external motivation (from the parents) that makes the larger difference for most students, and in the public schools you have students who don't even have that. In some cases the parents are even actively *antagonistic* toward education, e.g., getting upset if homework is assigned.
The teachers can lead the students to knowledge, but they can't force them to drink, and every apathetic unmotivated student in the class makes it harder for the teacher to teach, and harder for any students to learn anything who actually want to do so. Just *one* of these students in a classroom can make the teacher's job 2-3 times as hard, and if you manage to get five or six of them in the same class, the quality of education goes straight to Los Angeles.
In private schools you don't have nearly as much of this problem, for the simple reason that parents who don't care about education don't want to pay tuition and don't want to deal with extra requirements, and so they don't bother to send their kids to private schools. Virtually 100% of the kids whose parents don't care about their education end up in the public schools. Sure, private schools have students who don't really care very much about learning per se, but they *do* have motivation, in the form of grades, because they have to go home to their parents at night.
As for behavioral problems, in private schools, if the teacher even *threatens* to call a parent-teacher conference, the kids straighten right up and toe the line, because they know the threat has teeth. Try that in a public school and it's the teacher who gets an education: a lesson in the state of modern society.
Some public school districts have a larger problem with this than others, of course. The more white-collar the community is, generally, the smaller this problem is. A lot of inner city schools are in pretty dire straits, and going the other direction there are some yuppie-neighborhood public school districts that have (in terms of student motivation and parent involvement) almost a private-school dynamic going on, or at least something a lot more like it.
Personally, I consider any site to be highly disreputable and refuse to trust it at all if it doesn't have a domain in.com,.net,.org, or a first-world country-code TLD. I realize this is narrow-minded and insensitive of me, but I consider it to be reasonable anyway, given the popularity of obscure TLDs with illegitimate and fraudulent sites. If your domain is registered in a TLD belonging to a set of coral atolls that probably don't even have internet connectivity, you might about as well just use the IP address as your URL, as far as I'm concerned.
I do make a special exception for certain "gimmick" domain names, like last.fm for instance, but even there my patience with knock-off/copycat/follow-on sites will be severely limited.
> But, but, that's like, a 42% improvement! That's like, massive, man
I know you're not being entirely serious, but it's worth pointing out that in computing, any improvement of less than an order of magnitude (e.g., going from 5.17 fps to something like 10.3) is usually not user-noticeable. A "significant" improvement would be more like two magnitudes (going from 5.17 to something like 21 fps) or better, and "massive" would be even stronger than that.
(Yeah, I know, extreme overclockers will torture themselves and their hardware to get an extra 5% performance, but they have to use benchmarks to see the results. A normal person would never notice the difference.)
I lump ATI and Nvidia into the same general category of junk. Their graphics cards are toys. I suppose they're okay if you just want to play games all day...
Of course, for a server you scarcely even need a graphics card (how often are you even going to plug a monitor into it anyway, once for an hour when you do the initial install?), so any old junk will do, including Intel-chipset cheapies or even onboard video.
Microsoft has included "makes your computer faster", or some variant of that, in the advertising for every new version of their consumer operating systems since, I believe, DOS 5, possibly longer. It has always been, objectively, a flat-out lie. To my knowledge no new version of Windows has ever made any computer faster (than with the previous version on the same hardware) in any way, for any purpose, in the history of computing, ever.
(Unless, I suppose, you count the case wherein a hardware driver supporting hardware acceleration of some kind was available for the new version and not the old, but that would be fairly unusual; much more often the reverse is true for the first few months after a new OS release until the manufacturer gets its act together, and in some cases the driver for the old hardware *never* appears for the new OS.)
So far as I can tell, nobody's ever been able to call them on it, perhaps because "faster" is (legally speaking) a somewhat subjective term (kind of like "better") and therefore may fall within the realm of "opinion", and when it comes to opinion advertisements can say pretty well whatever they like.
But yeah, when Microsoft tells us something will be "faster", discerning users will not as a rule get very excited about this.
> [stuff about a traditional liberal-arts education] Those ideas are themselves ideals that have little > to do with reality (for most people who end up going to university. That has been my experience at least).
You can eliminate most of those people by excluding applicants whose degree is from any school that doesn't have meaningful admissions requirements, especially state universities. You'll throw out a little wheat with the chaff, but you'll greatly improve your odds of getting somebody who actually went to school to get an education. (Of course, not many employers do this. Some even strongly *favor* applicants from the nearest large state university with a popular sports program. Such is life.)
Actually, I kind of like the fact that my job has a lot of variety to it.
In fairness, I don't *just* do what you probably think of as network administration. Working for a small employer, I'm the whole IT department, so I get to do everything from designing network infrastructure (firewalls and so forth) to user training. In-house web development, getting quotes from vendors, database stuff, reports, technology planning, ordering, installation, if it has to do with computers, it falls to me. For a couple of years I even did the newsletters, while we were "between" publicity people.
I like this, because it has allowed me to learn quite a lot, and because I don't have to come in to work and do the same monotonous thing every day. I do get a little bit tired of certain things (e.g., printer issues, keeping the antivirus software up to date), but those are only small parts of my overall job.
This is not something anyone would ordinarily bother very much about, but given your signature...
> Now I design and implement service oriented integration solutions.
Technically, two-word adjectives like 'service-oriented' should be hyphenated in the attributive position.
Using 'integration' (which is a noun) as an adjective like this is correct in business English but would be frowned upon in formal academic contexts. In academic contexts it would be more correct to use the adjectival form, 'integrative', but you would never do that in a business document. In informal English, such as on slashdot, you can get away with either form, but the business-English form (which you used) is probably more common.
> But never the less,
'Nevertheless' is one word, traditionally classed as a coordinating adverb, though Geoffrey Nunberg would call it a "sentential adjunct". The phrase "never the less" as separate words can occur, but it would mean what one would expect given the individual meanings of the three words, which does not make sense in this context.
None of these issues is substantial enough to impede clarity, at least not to any significant extent. But an English teacher, or a proofreader, would mark them.
> I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
> Alas, nobody wants to take in someone without experience in this economy
Four years of *relevant* job experience is probably better on the resume than a degree. Both is obviously preferable to either alone. But I suspect the guy asking the original question is in the position of having neither.
If the algorithm can be implemented in 60 lines of Python or 70 lines of Java, it can probably be done in 10 lines of clear and maintainable Perl code, or 70 characters of golfed-down unmaintainable line noise.
If you're into functional programming, you probably want to steer clear of Python, not because you can't do any functional programming in Python (you can, somewhat) but because you Shouldn't. The general mindset in the Python community is that There's One Best Way To Do Everything, and as a general rule it is Guido's Way that is Best. Guido's Way, it should be noted, is pretty much always Object Oriented, whether that's actually a good fit for your particular programming task or not.
This doesn't make Python a bad language, necessarily. Some tasks are a good fit for Object Oriented programming and can be nicely implemented The Right Way in Python.
But if your main thing is functional programming, Python is not a very good fit for that. Learn Haskell or something instead.
Perl6, if it ever actually gets finished, is going to be really excellent for functional programming. I haven't checked on its progress lately, but the last time I did it was still a long way from done.
Perl5 has some FP support (e.g., you can do sling around anonymous functions and lexical closures), but it doesn't go all the way. The OO support is similarly limited. The good news is you can freely intermix them and they actually work together very well, which is nifty.
Ruby is said to have some FP support, but I don't know enough about it to comment beyond that. (It's on my TODO list, but right now there's a natural language taking up my language-learning time, so any new programming languages are on the back burner.)
Perl is a nice language. It's the CPAN that's awesome. If I had to pick between everything on sourceforge, and everything on the CPAN, I'd choose the latter without hesitation.
That depends on a variety of factors, including how your language/compiler/interpreter/runtime/whatever implements recursion. If the implementation is fully naive (no optimization at all), the main problem is that you use an amount of RAM proportional to the recursion depth, which can lead to a lot of swapping for large values of N. However, depending on exactly how your code uses the recursion, a more intelligent implementation may optimize away most of the memory usage.
How about Melanin Deficient? I like this one because it makes it sound like a disease.
"Yeah, I have AMDS (Advanced Melanin Deficiency Syndrome), so I'm abnormally vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. I have to stay indoors in the summer time because of this condition, or buy expensive lotions and put them on my skin every few minutes..."
Say, maybe we could get funding for research into AMDS...
What we really need, though, is proper medical records confidentiality so that people like prospective employers don't have access to information about whether we have this condition or not:-)
As for the other matter, just tell people it's really none of their business what kind of genitalia you have. That's personal.
> I can't believe there are still slashdot users out there that don't have add-block installed
I don't have adblock, but I didn't run into any particular problems with the advertising in the article.
This may have something to do with the fact that I _do_ have FlashBlock, and I have image.animation.mode set to once, and popups are disabled, and Javascript behavior is restricted in certain ways, and so on and so forth.
You see, I don't mind having advertisements in the page as long as they don't do anything egregious.
I don't want the advertisements (or anything else) to blink and flash and pop overtop of the text I'm trying to read, and I don't want them to open and move and resize windows and make themselves my home page and hide my menus and toolbars and mess with my bookmarks and dork around with my browser settings and change my wallpaper and animate cute little dancing bunnies on my desktop and install client-side software to "help" me "find" their affiliate sites and all that sort of rot,...
But I don't mind if there are advertisements in the webpage. I don't promise to pay close *attention* to them all the time, but I don't mind if they're there.
> Further, it's pretty obvious why the commercial is really laid out in the fashion it is: > It shows off far more features and how they work together than would be possible otherwise.
That would be valid if the main point of the commercial were all the stuff the device can do, but if you close your eyes and *listen* to the commercial, you'll note that ever other line spoken is, verbatim, as follows: "Really fast. *The* point of the commercial was the speed. That's why distorting the speed in such a substantial way is so misleading.
I think it would be neat to have a pie chart updated in realtime that breaks down the traffic by protocol (possibly with some related protocols lumped together): http, https, pop3/smtp, icmp, bittorrent, and so forth. I don't know of a package that does this, but I think it would be cool, in exactly the sort of way the summary is talking about, i.e., not something you'd actually use to make decisions, but interesting enough to show visitors, and easy to understand with a limited technical background, especially if you label the categories well.
Another real-time pie chart that might be similarly interesting is one breaking down the source/destination IP addresses of all your traffic into categories by global region: Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, Other. (I guess you could just label it "Oceania" rather than "Other", since I don't think Africa would actually register enough traffic to show up.)
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, there is, to my way of thinking, a fairly large difference between having a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, versus having the government actually *provide* you with them at taxpayer expense. The latter should only be the case if you need the weapon for government work because you are in the military, law enforcement, etc. Otherwise, I should think you ought to have to provide your *own* arms to keep and bear. That's how the right to keep and bear arms has always been understood in the past, if I'm not greatly mistaken.
I heard that Perl 6 is scheduled to be released in time for Christmas :-)
Besides, the _real_ end of days will be when Perl and Python and Ruby and Emacs are finally included in out-of-the-box Microsoft Windows installs.
> Government stimulus packages don't - because the money they hand out has to come from somewhere. ... or by "printing"
> That somewhere is either additional money they tax away
Actually, in the short term it's usually deficit spending. (This has its own set of economic consequences...) The idea, typically, is to make it up out of tax money later when the economy recovers. I'm not saying this is a *good* plan, but it's probably better than immediately raising taxes to stimulate the economy, to say nothing of printing extra currency (yikes!).
Wow, that might be even better than my idea for making a stretch limo out of a Yugo.
Say, if we're going to use an Eastern-Bloc car for the stretch limo, why not a '54 Lada?
> Secondly, any government school system will always pale in comparison to
> a private one because the government is terrible at managing anything.
It's worse than that. The government is bad at managing things, yes, but with public education, at least in the United States, there's an additional and much worse problem: the public schools are where the students go who have no motivation to be there or to learn. I don't just mean no *internal* motivation, either; it's actually the external motivation (from the parents) that makes the larger difference for most students, and in the public schools you have students who don't even have that. In some cases the parents are even actively *antagonistic* toward education, e.g., getting upset if homework is assigned.
The teachers can lead the students to knowledge, but they can't force them to drink, and every apathetic unmotivated student in the class makes it harder for the teacher to teach, and harder for any students to learn anything who actually want to do so. Just *one* of these students in a classroom can make the teacher's job 2-3 times as hard, and if you manage to get five or six of them in the same class, the quality of education goes straight to Los Angeles.
In private schools you don't have nearly as much of this problem, for the simple reason that parents who don't care about education don't want to pay tuition and don't want to deal with extra requirements, and so they don't bother to send their kids to private schools. Virtually 100% of the kids whose parents don't care about their education end up in the public schools. Sure, private schools have students who don't really care very much about learning per se, but they *do* have motivation, in the form of grades, because they have to go home to their parents at night.
As for behavioral problems, in private schools, if the teacher even *threatens* to call a parent-teacher conference, the kids straighten right up and toe the line, because they know the threat has teeth. Try that in a public school and it's the teacher who gets an education: a lesson in the state of modern society.
Some public school districts have a larger problem with this than others, of course. The more white-collar the community is, generally, the smaller this problem is. A lot of inner city schools are in pretty dire straits, and going the other direction there are some yuppie-neighborhood public school districts that have (in terms of student motivation and parent involvement) almost a private-school dynamic going on, or at least something a lot more like it.
Personally, I consider any site to be highly disreputable and refuse to trust it at all if it doesn't have a domain in .com, .net, .org, or a first-world country-code TLD. I realize this is narrow-minded and insensitive of me, but I consider it to be reasonable anyway, given the popularity of obscure TLDs with illegitimate and fraudulent sites. If your domain is registered in a TLD belonging to a set of coral atolls that probably don't even have internet connectivity, you might about as well just use the IP address as your URL, as far as I'm concerned.
I do make a special exception for certain "gimmick" domain names, like last.fm for instance, but even there my patience with knock-off/copycat/follow-on sites will be severely limited.
> But, but, that's like, a 42% improvement! That's like, massive, man
I know you're not being entirely serious, but it's worth pointing out that in computing, any improvement of less than an order of magnitude (e.g., going from 5.17 fps to something like 10.3) is usually not user-noticeable. A "significant" improvement would be more like two magnitudes (going from 5.17 to something like 21 fps) or better, and "massive" would be even stronger than that.
(Yeah, I know, extreme overclockers will torture themselves and their hardware to get an extra 5% performance, but they have to use benchmarks to see the results. A normal person would never notice the difference.)
I lump ATI and Nvidia into the same general category of junk. Their graphics cards are toys. I suppose they're okay if you just want to play games all day...
Of course, for a server you scarcely even need a graphics card (how often are you even going to plug a monitor into it anyway, once for an hour when you do the initial install?), so any old junk will do, including Intel-chipset cheapies or even onboard video.
But for a workstation I always go with Matrox.
Microsoft has included "makes your computer faster", or some variant of that, in the advertising for every new version of their consumer operating systems since, I believe, DOS 5, possibly longer. It has always been, objectively, a flat-out lie. To my knowledge no new version of Windows has ever made any computer faster (than with the previous version on the same hardware) in any way, for any purpose, in the history of computing, ever.
(Unless, I suppose, you count the case wherein a hardware driver supporting hardware acceleration of some kind was available for the new version and not the old, but that would be fairly unusual; much more often the reverse is true for the first few months after a new OS release until the manufacturer gets its act together, and in some cases the driver for the old hardware *never* appears for the new OS.)
So far as I can tell, nobody's ever been able to call them on it, perhaps because "faster" is (legally speaking) a somewhat subjective term (kind of like "better") and therefore may fall within the realm of "opinion", and when it comes to opinion advertisements can say pretty well whatever they like.
But yeah, when Microsoft tells us something will be "faster", discerning users will not as a rule get very excited about this.
> [stuff about a traditional liberal-arts education] Those ideas are themselves ideals that have little
> to do with reality (for most people who end up going to university. That has been my experience at least).
You can eliminate most of those people by excluding applicants whose degree is from any school that doesn't have meaningful admissions requirements, especially state universities. You'll throw out a little wheat with the chaff, but you'll greatly improve your odds of getting somebody who actually went to school to get an education. (Of course, not many employers do this. Some even strongly *favor* applicants from the nearest large state university with a popular sports program. Such is life.)
Actually, I kind of like the fact that my job has a lot of variety to it.
In fairness, I don't *just* do what you probably think of as network administration. Working for a small employer, I'm the whole IT department, so I get to do everything from designing network infrastructure (firewalls and so forth) to user training. In-house web development, getting quotes from vendors, database stuff, reports, technology planning, ordering, installation, if it has to do with computers, it falls to me. For a couple of years I even did the newsletters, while we were "between" publicity people.
I like this, because it has allowed me to learn quite a lot, and because I don't have to come in to work and do the same monotonous thing every day. I do get a little bit tired of certain things (e.g., printer issues, keeping the antivirus software up to date), but those are only small parts of my overall job.
This is not something anyone would ordinarily bother very much about, but given your signature...
> Now I design and implement service oriented integration solutions.
Technically, two-word adjectives like 'service-oriented' should be hyphenated in the attributive position.
Using 'integration' (which is a noun) as an adjective like this is correct in business English but would be frowned upon in formal academic contexts. In academic contexts it would be more correct to use the adjectival form, 'integrative', but you would never do that in a business document. In informal English, such as on slashdot, you can get away with either form, but the business-English form (which you used) is probably more common.
> But never the less,
'Nevertheless' is one word, traditionally classed as a coordinating adverb, though Geoffrey Nunberg would call it a "sentential adjunct". The phrase "never the less" as separate words can occur, but it would mean what one would expect given the individual meanings of the three words, which does not make sense in this context.
None of these issues is substantial enough to impede clarity, at least not to any significant extent. But an English teacher, or a proofreader, would mark them.
> I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.
YAFI.HTH.HAND.
> Alas, nobody wants to take in someone without experience in this economy
Four years of *relevant* job experience is probably better on the resume than a degree. Both is obviously preferable to either alone. But I suspect the guy asking the original question is in the position of having neither.
If the algorithm can be implemented in 60 lines of Python or 70 lines of Java, it can probably be done in 10 lines of clear and maintainable Perl code, or 70 characters of golfed-down unmaintainable line noise.
If you're into functional programming, you probably want to steer clear of Python, not because you can't do any functional programming in Python (you can, somewhat) but because you Shouldn't. The general mindset in the Python community is that There's One Best Way To Do Everything, and as a general rule it is Guido's Way that is Best. Guido's Way, it should be noted, is pretty much always Object Oriented, whether that's actually a good fit for your particular programming task or not.
This doesn't make Python a bad language, necessarily. Some tasks are a good fit for Object Oriented programming and can be nicely implemented The Right Way in Python.
But if your main thing is functional programming, Python is not a very good fit for that. Learn Haskell or something instead.
Perl6, if it ever actually gets finished, is going to be really excellent for functional programming. I haven't checked on its progress lately, but the last time I did it was still a long way from done.
Perl5 has some FP support (e.g., you can do sling around anonymous functions and lexical closures), but it doesn't go all the way. The OO support is similarly limited. The good news is you can freely intermix them and they actually work together very well, which is nifty.
Ruby is said to have some FP support, but I don't know enough about it to comment beyond that. (It's on my TODO list, but right now there's a natural language taking up my language-learning time, so any new programming languages are on the back burner.)
> Perl is awesome!
Perl is a nice language. It's the CPAN that's awesome. If I had to pick between everything on sourceforge, and everything on the CPAN, I'd choose the latter without hesitation.
> What's wrong with recursion?
That depends on a variety of factors, including how your language/compiler/interpreter/runtime/whatever implements recursion. If the implementation is fully naive (no optimization at all), the main problem is that you use an amount of RAM proportional to the recursion depth, which can lead to a lot of swapping for large values of N. However, depending on exactly how your code uses the recursion, a more intelligent implementation may optimize away most of the memory usage.
How about Melanin Deficient? I like this one because it makes it sound like a disease.
:-)
"Yeah, I have AMDS (Advanced Melanin Deficiency Syndrome), so I'm abnormally vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. I have to stay indoors in the summer time because of this condition, or buy expensive lotions and put them on my skin every few minutes..."
Say, maybe we could get funding for research into AMDS...
What we really need, though, is proper medical records confidentiality so that people like prospective employers don't have access to information about whether we have this condition or not
As for the other matter, just tell people it's really none of their business what kind of genitalia you have. That's personal.
My Electric Razor Doesn't Take Those Blades, You Insensitive Clod.
> I can't believe there are still slashdot users out there that don't have add-block installed
...
I don't have adblock, but I didn't run into any particular problems with the advertising in the article.
This may have something to do with the fact that I _do_ have FlashBlock, and I have image.animation.mode set to once, and popups are disabled, and Javascript behavior is restricted in certain ways, and so on and so forth.
You see, I don't mind having advertisements in the page as long as they don't do anything egregious.
I don't want the advertisements (or anything else) to blink and flash and pop overtop of the text I'm trying to read, and I don't want them to open and move and resize windows and make themselves my home page and hide my menus and toolbars and mess with my bookmarks and dork around with my browser settings and change my wallpaper and animate cute little dancing bunnies on my desktop and install client-side software to "help" me "find" their affiliate sites and all that sort of rot,
But I don't mind if there are advertisements in the webpage. I don't promise to pay close *attention* to them all the time, but I don't mind if they're there.
> Further, it's pretty obvious why the commercial is really laid out in the fashion it is:
> It shows off far more features and how they work together than would be possible otherwise.
That would be valid if the main point of the commercial were all the stuff the device can do, but if you close your eyes and *listen* to the commercial, you'll note that ever other line spoken is, verbatim, as follows: "Really fast. *The* point of the commercial was the speed. That's why distorting the speed in such a substantial way is so misleading.
> As a member of the exclusive club of former fast-food employees
Wow, I never realized we were an *exclusive* club. Cool!
I think it would be neat to have a pie chart updated in realtime that breaks down the traffic by protocol (possibly with some related protocols lumped together): http, https, pop3/smtp, icmp, bittorrent, and so forth. I don't know of a package that does this, but I think it would be cool, in exactly the sort of way the summary is talking about, i.e., not something you'd actually use to make decisions, but interesting enough to show visitors, and easy to understand with a limited technical background, especially if you label the categories well.
Another real-time pie chart that might be similarly interesting is one breaking down the source/destination IP addresses of all your traffic into categories by global region: Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, Other. (I guess you could just label it "Oceania" rather than "Other", since I don't think Africa would actually register enough traffic to show up.)
> There's already a treatment guaranteed to prevent the expression of these symptoms: abortion.
Did you also know that hydrogen cyanide cures AIDS? It's a proven fact, but they don't want you to know.
Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare.