It mentions "nonce" in the text. Well in British english that means a child molestor though I suspect thats not what they mean here , so what does it mean?
"ANYWHERE NEAR as good as VC++, maybe I wouldn't despise working on it."
If you're a half decent programmer you'd be able to code just as well with a text editor as with an IDE. That fact that you imply you can't says more about you than the linux dev enviroment.
>Uhm... there's something called T9 on most phones...
*hollow laugh*
Yeah , isn't it great. Not. At most it gets 80% correct and having to go back and redo the word makes it more painful than just typing it all in manually in the first place. Predictive text is a joke that should've been left in the lab.
"and it's because 99% of people I talk to on a regular basis are available via SMS or AIM."
Not really "talk" is it? Never saw the attraction of SMS myself , just seems like a poor mans email with its pathetic 196 character limit and hopeless word entry system on a numeric keypad. Sure its useful to send directions or something so the other person has a written record but having a "conversation" using SMS is best left to socially inept tweenies and teens who can't actually come out with sentences of more than 3 words at a time anyway.
"Much of our Sci-Fi has come true because WE aimed for it. Star Trek Comms anybody? They're called cell phones now."
Actually most of it hasn't, we just notice the stuff that has. What about antimatter driven warp engines? Transporters? Anyway , star trek comms were little advanced from the walkie talkies that existed in the 60s anyway!
"Id dare to claim that just one of our desktops are just as powerful as the whole world of machines 20 years ago"
I'm guessing you weren't around 20 years ago then. The supercomputers of the mid 80s would still easy blow a current desktop PC into the weeds, plus the fact that given a current desktop runs at 3Ghz and computers then were (for the sake of argument) 3Mhz , you'd only need 1000 of them to equal a current desktop. Ok , chips now carry out more instructions per clock cycle than then so say you'd need 10,000 of the old CPUs. Still hardly a whole world of machines.
"we dont have that long to wait."
Given that no one really knows how the human brain carries out its information processing and the current woeful state of AI I'd suggest that true human like Ai is decades and decades away. Don't confuse processing power with intelligence - they're not the same thing. Its like saying that with ever more powerful engines that one day a car will fly. It won't , not unless you give it wings.
He's yet another idiot that seems to think that by trawling a thesaurus and using every alternative word and phrase he can find it'll somehow give his ideas more gravitas. To me it actually says style over substance but each to their own.
I remember reading a column Peter Cochrane used to write in a newspaper many moons ago. IMO the man is definately a paid of member of the Kevin Warwick (Reading uni , "notorious" AI professor) Pie In the Sky Club whereby they both take bog standard science fiction topics that can be found in 101 paperback books written in the last 40 years, mix in a large amount of 1960s technology can solve any problem attitude , ignore any negative aspects or complicated social issues of what they're proposing and then set a deadline for it to happen about 10-20 years in the future , so far enough away that it seems plausable and also far enough so anyone will have forgotten what they said if they got it completely wrong.
I'm sure to a pro like yourself or an audiophile the older digital kit sounded bad (though perhaps "garbage" is a bit strong?) but to a casual music listener like myself they were perfectly satisfactory. Until 2 years ago I had a 1988 Sony CD player with bog standard 16 bit DAC (not oversampling) and to my ears I couldn't tell the difference between it and a 2003 almost top of the range Sony DVD/SACD/CD player which I also own.
Anyway , remember that before CD came along the consumer definition of "high quality" was an analogue tape deck with HX-Pro. Compared to that even a 14 bit straight-out-the-lab early 80s CD player sounded like perfection.
Thats 50 years ago , hopefully things are a bit more enlightened today.
>Protecting a culture and a Language that over 80% of Quebec population speak is not something I would call obsessive.
80% of the population might speak it but if 80% of the population WANT to speak it then surely it would not need protecting? The only logical reason for protecting it in that case is because the majority of people in Quebec want to use English and if they want to then who has the right to tell them to use French?
You can't force people to use a language. If poeple in montreal didnt want to speak french or use it in business thats their choice , who are the government and a bunch of language obsessives to say otherwise? Its not like french is some minority endangered language about to go extinct. Besides which IMO people get too hung up on languages , they're just a way to communicate , they're not culture. If a language defines culture then how come Quebec and France are so different culturally? (Not to mention Britain and the USA)
DAB quality is poor because it uses such a low bitrate. This isn't a design feature , but rather the result of trying to cram far more stations into the given bandwidth than was originally devised. DAB might in theory have better quality than FM but in practice the reverse is true for this reason so for myself I'm sticking with my analogue gear for the forseable future.
"Then they are put out when the theists counter that 4000 years of history"
What does it matter whether its 4000 years , 4 years or 4 minutes? Why do you keep bandying about this rough estimate of people being monotheistic you've dredged up? You think it gives your counter argument any more weight? It doesn't. Multitheistic religions go back a lot further (and they still exist - look up Hinduism), perhaps we should get them to argue it out with the monotheists and (using your logic) presumably win the high ground since they have even MORE history on their side.
You acuse other people of strawman arguments , but at least they're attempting some sort of argument rather than some feeble whining about historical importance some schoolboy rationalle about the length of time a belief being around giving it some sort of gravitas and immunity to critiscm.
"To put it a little differently, there is more entropy in the lower-order bits. "
Not always - text is an exception. For a string of character data going from 0 to 256 (or 127 , it doesn't matter) for an idealised language where all letters are used equally then bit 0 will be '1' 50% of the time and '0' 50% of the time. Similarly bit 7 will follow the same pattern and all the bits inbetween. Ok , in real languages some letters are prefered over others but this will effect the entropy of the lower bits depending where the letters occur in the character set in use , NOT depending on how high the actual values are which is what your point is based on.
>Technically, Anlgo-Saxon is English, aka "Old English."
Anglo Saxon have rise to dutch, fresian and arguably German too. They can't all be english. Its a bit like saying Latin is just Old Italian/Spanish/French.
Yes, nice karma whoring. The point is the Hobbit is set before the events in the LOTR so call it the first book, call it a prequel or call it Tracey , makes little odds. It comes before. Which is what a prequel would do.
"Tolkein is supposed to have said that nothing of value had been written in English since 1066"
Given English as we know it didn't exist in 1066 (ever tried reading Anglo Saxon?) I think he may have been wrong on that account:) English as we know it doesn't start becoming vaguely intelligable to modern ears until the 14th century in chaucers time , and even then you'd be doing well to understand more than 50% of whats written without a translation.
Given the size of the book it was inveitable he'd have to emit large chunks of it to fit it into any reasonble time. As it was its , what , 9 hours for all 3 films? Personally I think it was a mistake to miss out the Tom Bombadil section in Fellowship but I guess if he'd left that in he'd have had to have cut out something else perhaps more crucial to the story. Who knows.
"The Hobbit or the planned Lord of the Rings prequel"
Sorry?? The Hobbit *IS* the prequel to LOTR. Please tell they're not going to get some Hollywood paint-by-numbers screenwriters commitee to butcher Tolkeins ideas and come up with some Phantom Menace debarcle? Will they have Gollum with dreadlocks and speaking in some fau-jamaican patois and Gandalf as some all-american apple pie and freckles kid who Has Yet To Discover His Powers blah blah etc etc. Gah!
Copying a post and changing a few words is really old and isn't an argument. Using your logic perhaps someone should open a free chip foundry since , hey , why should we use the closed design Intel or AMD chips? Or why stop there , perhaps open our own metalworks , why pay for Rio Tinto to process stuff for us , just get the FSF out with their spades and we're off! Right?
Bascially , smelting metals for circuit boards might not be interesting or helpful to you, but it is to some people. As few computer users know much about how their hardware works... etc etc blah blah.
Slashdot Mirror
cout > operators as I/O operators was a very poor decision , though I guess that fits in with the rest of the abortion that is C++
It mentions "nonce" in the text. Well in British english that means a child molestor though I suspect thats not what they mean here , so what does it mean?
"ANYWHERE NEAR as good as VC++, maybe I wouldn't despise working on it."
If you're a half decent programmer you'd be able to code just as well with a text editor as with an IDE. That fact that you imply you can't says more about you than the linux dev enviroment.
>Uhm... there's something called T9 on most phones...
*hollow laugh*
Yeah , isn't it great. Not. At most it gets 80% correct and having to go back and redo the word makes it more painful than just typing it all in manually in the first place. Predictive text is a joke that should've been left in the lab.
Duh , wonder why that is Booboo? Perhaps its because you can't say as much in them.
Learn gardening - grow yourself a brain.
Cor Blimey , 'oo let Dick Van Bleedin Dyke onto Slashdot?
"and it's because 99% of people I talk to on a regular basis are available via SMS or AIM."
Not really "talk" is it? Never saw the attraction of SMS myself , just seems like a poor mans email with its pathetic 196 character limit and hopeless word entry system on a numeric keypad. Sure its useful to send directions or something so the other person has a written record but having a "conversation" using SMS is best left to socially inept tweenies and teens who can't actually come out with sentences of more than 3 words at a time anyway.
"Much of our Sci-Fi has come true because WE aimed for it. Star Trek Comms anybody? They're called cell phones now."
Actually most of it hasn't, we just notice the stuff that has. What about antimatter driven warp engines? Transporters?
Anyway , star trek comms were little advanced from the walkie talkies that existed in the 60s anyway!
"Id dare to claim that just one of our desktops are just as powerful as the whole world of machines 20 years ago"
I'm guessing you weren't around 20 years ago then. The supercomputers of the mid 80s would still easy blow a current desktop PC into the weeds, plus the fact that given a current desktop runs at 3Ghz and computers then were (for the sake of argument) 3Mhz , you'd only need 1000 of them to equal a current desktop. Ok , chips now carry out more instructions per clock cycle than then so say you'd need 10,000 of the old CPUs. Still hardly a whole world of machines.
"we dont have that long to wait."
Given that no one really knows how the human brain carries out its information processing and the current woeful state of AI I'd suggest that true human like Ai is decades and decades away. Don't confuse processing power with intelligence - they're not the same thing. Its like saying that with ever more powerful engines that one day a car will fly. It won't , not unless you give it wings.
He's yet another idiot that seems to think that by trawling a thesaurus and using every alternative
word and phrase he can find it'll somehow give his ideas more gravitas. To me it actually says
style over substance but each to their own.
I remember reading a column Peter Cochrane used to write in a newspaper many moons ago. IMO the man is definately a paid of member of the Kevin Warwick (Reading uni , "notorious" AI professor) Pie In the Sky Club whereby they both take bog standard science fiction topics that can be found in 101 paperback books written in the last 40 years, mix in a large amount of 1960s technology can solve any problem attitude , ignore any negative aspects or complicated social issues of what they're proposing and then set a deadline for it to happen about 10-20 years in the future , so far enough away that it seems plausable and also far enough so anyone will have forgotten what they said if they got it completely wrong.
I'm sure to a pro like yourself or an audiophile the older digital kit sounded bad (though perhaps "garbage" is a bit strong?) but to a casual music listener like myself they were perfectly satisfactory. Until 2 years ago I had a 1988 Sony CD player with bog standard 16 bit DAC (not oversampling) and to my ears I couldn't tell the difference between it and a 2003 almost top of the range Sony DVD/SACD/CD player which I also own.
Anyway , remember that before CD came along the consumer definition of "high quality" was an analogue tape deck with HX-Pro. Compared to that even a 14 bit straight-out-the-lab early 80s CD player sounded like perfection.
Sounds like a job for Dolby C ;)
>50 years back people were told to "speak white"
Thats 50 years ago , hopefully things are a bit more enlightened today.
>Protecting a culture and a Language that over 80% of Quebec population speak is not something I would call obsessive.
80% of the population might speak it but if 80% of the population WANT to speak it then surely
it would not need protecting? The only logical reason for protecting it in that case is because
the majority of people in Quebec want to use English and if they want to then who has
the right to tell them to use French?
You can't force people to use a language. If poeple in montreal didnt want to speak french or use it in business thats their choice , who are the government and a bunch of language obsessives to say otherwise? Its not like french is some minority endangered language about to go extinct. Besides which IMO people get too hung up on languages , they're just a way to communicate , they're not culture. If a language defines culture then how come Quebec and France are so different culturally?
(Not to mention Britain and the USA)
DAB quality is poor because it uses such a low bitrate. This isn't a design feature , but rather the result of trying to cram far more stations into the given bandwidth than was originally devised. DAB might in theory have better quality than FM but in practice the reverse is true for this reason so for myself I'm sticking with my analogue gear for the forseable future.
"What, then, would 33 extra years be worth?"
Not much if you end up spending them bouncing off padded walls in a sanatorium.
"Then they are put out when the theists counter that 4000 years of history"
What does it matter whether its 4000 years , 4 years or 4 minutes? Why do you keep bandying about this rough estimate of people being monotheistic you've dredged up? You think it gives your counter argument any more weight? It doesn't. Multitheistic religions go back a lot further (and they still exist - look up Hinduism), perhaps we should get them to argue it out with the monotheists and (using your logic) presumably win the high ground since they have even MORE history on their side.
You acuse other people of strawman arguments , but at least they're attempting some sort of argument rather than some feeble whining about historical importance some schoolboy rationalle about the length of time a belief being around giving it some sort of gravitas and immunity to critiscm.
"To put it a little differently, there is more entropy in the lower-order bits. "
Not always - text is an exception. For a string of character data going from 0 to 256
(or 127 , it doesn't matter) for an idealised language where all letters are used
equally then bit 0 will be '1' 50% of the time and '0' 50% of the time. Similarly
bit 7 will follow the same pattern and all the bits inbetween. Ok , in real languages
some letters are prefered over others but this will effect the entropy of the lower
bits depending where the letters occur in the character set in use , NOT depending
on how high the actual values are which is what your point is based on.
>Technically, Anlgo-Saxon is English, aka "Old English."
Anglo Saxon have rise to dutch, fresian and arguably German too.
They can't all be english. Its a bit like saying Latin is just
Old Italian/Spanish/French.
Yes, nice karma whoring. The point is the Hobbit is set before the events in the LOTR so call it the first book, call it a prequel or call it Tracey , makes little odds. It comes before. Which is what a prequel would do.
Pedant.
"Tolkein is supposed to have said that nothing of value had been written in English since 1066"
:) English as we know it doesn't start becoming vaguely intelligable to modern ears until the 14th century in chaucers time , and even then you'd be doing well to understand more than 50% of whats written without a translation.
Given English as we know it didn't exist in 1066 (ever tried reading Anglo Saxon?) I think he may have been wrong on that account
Given the size of the book it was inveitable he'd have to emit large chunks of it to fit it into any reasonble time. As it was its , what , 9 hours for all 3 films? Personally I think it was a mistake to miss out the Tom Bombadil section in Fellowship but I guess if he'd left that in he'd have had to have cut out something else perhaps more crucial to the story. Who knows.
"The Hobbit or the planned Lord of the Rings prequel"
Sorry?? The Hobbit *IS* the prequel to LOTR. Please tell they're not going
to get some Hollywood paint-by-numbers screenwriters commitee to butcher Tolkeins
ideas and come up with some Phantom Menace debarcle? Will they have Gollum with
dreadlocks and speaking in some fau-jamaican patois and Gandalf as some all-american
apple pie and freckles kid who Has Yet To Discover His Powers blah blah etc etc.
Gah!
Copying a post and changing a few words is really old and isn't an argument. Using your logic perhaps someone should open a free chip foundry since , hey , why should we use the closed design Intel or AMD chips? Or why stop there , perhaps open our own metalworks , why pay for Rio Tinto to process stuff for us , just get the FSF out with their spades and we're off! Right?
... etc etc blah blah.
Bascially , smelting metals for circuit boards might not be interesting or helpful to you, but it is to some people. As few computer users know much about how their hardware works