Because Googling for "go" gets you 2,950,000,000 hits. Yes, that's billions. And yet they didn't see that choosing such a common word for a language name was a bad idea. Ah, how the mighty goof up.
If you want to get a syntax example for perl, you google for "perl syntax" or "perl printf" or some such.
If you want info for Go, you type "go syntax" and since the word GO is one of the most common in the English language, you get 14,700,000 hits.
DUMB NAME. VERY BAD NAME.
Google should immediately make lemonade out of lemons and change the name to something like "golang" or "goog" -- everyone will be much happier that they did, and did it reasonably early.
If you've got a big download going, you're screwed until it's done. It'd be faster to break the files up into chunks and really dance around the timing.
"Whas has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?"
Whas? Well, anyway -- did two upgrades. One on a laptop, the other on a Desktop. One Intel with an Intel video chipset, one AMD with an ATI one. Everything's great except lack of glx on the AMD/ATI box.
I know you know that from what you see around you -- for example the above poster. But just in case you might have thought there could possibly have been an improvement in the past couple of years that hasn't started to show up yet... there isn't one.
> A timing belt has TEETH, which make it a precise digital computer, dividing the revolution of the crankshaft by the right integer in order to drive the camshaft.
No, that's the difference between a timing belt (like my first two cars) and a timing chain (which all my later cars have used).
You're right on all points with respect to the chain, but you're thinking that cars are/were less crappy than they are/were.
But I'm not sure the time critical argument works so well, these days. Let's say we designed a numeric package which was capable of ratio storage and irrational storage as well. Perhaps even able to handle unknowns. Let's say it was 1000 times slower than modern floating point calculations. We'd still be able to do something like a million calculations a second, and we'd know this as part of the parameters we'd use to decide where to use it and how.
We'd only use it where necessary, or where speed wasn't a critical issue (better to err on the side of accuracy). And if we made such a library pretty standard and everyone used it, processors would probably begin to include specific instructions to improve the performance of "correct" math.
The thing is that we don't test enough and basically don't care enough whether the math is right. We generally think it's all good enough. And that really ought to change.
We made the compromises we now live with, after all, when computers were thousands of times slower than they are today.
I agree, but remember this was 1991, and a military project. That means they (probably) chose the processor they'd use years before, because military projects take SO LONG and you need to fill out massive amounts of paperwork and have many huge meetings to change anything. So they might have been using a processor from 1984 or 1985, assuming the battery was PAC-2, not a PAC-3.
They STILL should have used more accuracy, but while we'd do that now by reflex, they might have been trying to cram something into a vastly smaller box than we would now normally envision.
Now I have another reason to use bc instead of Excel.
Bender:~/docs$ bc bc 1.06.94 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 850*77.1 65535.0 1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1 0
Agreed. But money exchanges aren't the answer. Companies simply factor that as a cost of business, even if it's a risk of cost, not a cost ultimately paid.
Consumers will want longer lasting GPS than an Android phone for handheld stuff, at least some of the time.
Some consumers will want GPS navigation where Google doesn't have maps.
So no.
But this will drastically cut into sales of GPSs for people who fit the Android/cell phone niche well, and that is a lot of people.
The response will be some mergers in the GPS space, or just companies going out of business, and will make GPS manufacturers do two things:
1. Concentrate on handhelds more, over car-based systems -- car systems will still be a big deal and the flagship, but more attention will go into smaller devices you carry with you, like watches and hats/backpack attachements where they can compete much better.
2. GPS manufacturers will add building topo like you see in Korean GPSs when you drive in Seoul -- 3d reps of many of the buildings in a city.
3. GPSs manufacturers will look for cheaper data rate contracts based on being able to estimate the data flow from their devices better than an android phone can.
4. One GPS manufacturer will look to the iPhone to compete, establishing a partnership with Apple to keep all other GPSs navigation software out. It will pay Apple a LOT of money. Apple will later screw them somehow as iPhone sales drop.
It used to be the case that a phenomenal percentage of nurses had one or more parents who were alcoholics. They were used to taking care of people with little reward.
Now we need more nurses, we pay more, this attracts people with different attributes, and we worry about not getting a self-selected group.
An interesting situation.
Maybe we should lower the pay of nurses, again, remove all taxes from alcohol and lay off a bunch of adults to encourage parental drinking? That would breed a new super-race of patient people with low expectations who'll take shit from doctors all day and still be nice to patients while wiping their butts.
Or we could work on better training for nurse candidates and a lot of role-play early in their education. That's another thought. Maybe not as good, but a possibility.
Mitochondrial evidence conclusively proves this isn't so. Never, not once, did a Neanderthal ever get his/her genes in the modern pool.
I think that means mitochondrial evidence is crap.
How did we get to look so different in so little time? Why do Neanderthals found in China has a bump on the top of the head that is common now in modern humans found in China and not common in non-China-area Neanderthals nor non-China-area modern humans? (This is a trivial-sounding example, but it's supposedly pretty easy to see in the remains.)
Why didn't any Ns get domesticated/preserved? Why isn't there one single place somewhere where MH didn't go but Ns did, even though Ns had so much longer than MHs to move around, and N remains are found pretty far and wide.
I just don't buy the mitochondrial proof that Ns didn't mate with MHs ever. Maybe they're right, but its not intutive.
They may agrue that one back and forth, with little data and no way to conclude anything, but there's a real obvious difference between us and them.
Our spine comes into our pelvis behind the hips. This means that the pelvis rocks as we walk and makes it possible for us to walk long distances without pain. Neanderthal's spine joined his pelvis right in line with his hips.
OUCH!
Neanderthal might have been as smart as us or smarter, or he might have lacked specialized brain functions like complex language abilities which we sport. Who cares? He accomplished nothing because he spent his whole life with a backache.
I'm only seeing a few quotes repeated in a few forms.
Given that there's a typo in the first line of the extract which is getting bandied about I'm especially uncomfortable calling/emailing/faxing my congresscritter to rip him a new one.
I want to see the whole thing, THEN I will rip him a new one.
Which would be a service to him, because apparently, his current one is plugged by the external sexual organs of our local ILEC and cable companies.
This is ultimately the reason why ILECs are so slow, bloated and inefficient. The more people they have doing manual (both technical and paperwork) tasks, the less automation they have and the slower and less profitable they are, but conversely, the more votes they seem to control and the more they can enforce legislative support for archaic business models (monopolies wherever possible) and behaviors on the politicians in each state. "If this passes, we'll have to lay people off. We'll lay your district people off, and we'll blame you." They repeat this threat over and over, like a monotone operator message recording.
Our congresspeople keep screwing us (and primarily their own district people) because they're frightened. This is why you should always think very carefully before ever siding with an ILEC on ANYTHING.
Roddenberry's bible on the original ST explicitly said that no solution to any plot issue/conflict may ever be resolved by a technological solution -- interpersonal relations/social behavior needed to resolve things.
This was thrown out in TNG, which is why it sucked monkies.
The best science fiction is represented by PKD, not Varley. It's the society and the people and ideas that matter in any fiction, not the gears and details of the tech.
You are utterly right: They need to read short fiction (no massive tomes) and to avoid Tolkien, beyond fragments (though they could possibly read the Hobbit) and they need to read "The Sleeper Awakes" by Wells.
If they do a book by Card, clearly it should be Ender's game.
I think, personally, that it's his best book, but ignoring that, there are practical concerns: It's fastest paced book and will keep High Schoolers' attention. It's also one of his shortest books -- they wouldn't have time to read any of his others.
Unless you're reading at least something by Philip K. Dick, I think your class is not much of a class on the subject.
Philip defines not just science fiction in the modern age, but modern writing. The key to good science fiction is that the science is not important -- it's the science's impact on the society and the individual that is important. Phil knew nothing about science, which freed him to actually write.
Other writers, before him, came up with a tech idea and showed what it would do to society, but Phil came up with non-science nonsense and explored what that would do to society. He freed science fiction to move freely, instead of being anchored to ponderous rigor.
And then there's HG Wells. Why write SF? HG Wells looked at what the wars of his time did to people and society and came up with worlds where the tech around us destroyed the things we held sacred and pulled us into more and worse wars. Now we look back and think "Duh" because we are a much, much more cynical age -- thanks hugely to him. He showed us (as in The Food of The Gods) that all tech will be used for wars, no matter how non-military it might seem.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Googling for "go" gets you 2,950,000,000 hits. Yes, that's billions. And yet they didn't see that choosing such a common word for a language name was a bad idea. Ah, how the mighty goof up.
If you want to get a syntax example for perl, you google for "perl syntax" or "perl printf" or some such.
If you want info for Go, you type "go syntax" and since the word GO is one of the most common in the English language, you get 14,700,000 hits.
DUMB NAME. VERY BAD NAME.
Google should immediately make lemonade out of lemons and change the name to something like "golang" or "goog" -- everyone will be much happier that they did, and did it reasonably early.
If you've got a big download going, you're screwed until it's done. It'd be faster to break the files up into chunks and really dance around the timing.
That's crap.
"Whas has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?"
Whas? Well, anyway -- did two upgrades. One on a laptop, the other on a Desktop. One Intel with an Intel video chipset, one AMD with an ATI one. Everything's great except lack of glx on the AMD/ATI box.
No. Things are really only getting worse.
I know you know that from what you see around you -- for example the above poster. But just in case you might have thought there could possibly have been an improvement in the past couple of years that hasn't started to show up yet... there isn't one.
I'm a US resident and a very discouraged person.
> A timing belt has TEETH, which make it a precise digital computer, dividing the revolution of the crankshaft by the right integer in order to drive the camshaft.
No, that's the difference between a timing belt (like my first two cars) and a timing chain (which all my later cars have used).
You're right on all points with respect to the chain, but you're thinking that cars are/were less crappy than they are/were.
You're spot on about irrational numbers.
But I'm not sure the time critical argument works so well, these days. Let's say we designed a numeric package which was capable of ratio storage and irrational storage as well. Perhaps even able to handle unknowns. Let's say it was 1000 times slower than modern floating point calculations. We'd still be able to do something like a million calculations a second, and we'd know this as part of the parameters we'd use to decide where to use it and how.
We'd only use it where necessary, or where speed wasn't a critical issue (better to err on the side of accuracy). And if we made such a library pretty standard and everyone used it, processors would probably begin to include specific instructions to improve the performance of "correct" math.
The thing is that we don't test enough and basically don't care enough whether the math is right. We generally think it's all good enough. And that really ought to change.
We made the compromises we now live with, after all, when computers were thousands of times slower than they are today.
I agree, but remember this was 1991, and a military project. That means they (probably) chose the processor they'd use years before, because military projects take SO LONG and you need to fill out massive amounts of paperwork and have many huge meetings to change anything. So they might have been using a processor from 1984 or 1985, assuming the battery was PAC-2, not a PAC-3.
They STILL should have used more accuracy, but while we'd do that now by reflex, they might have been trying to cram something into a vastly smaller box than we would now normally envision.
Now I have another reason to use bc instead of Excel.
Bender:~/docs$ bc
bc 1.06.94
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
850*77.1
65535.0
1.0 - 0.9 - 0.1
0
Agreed. But money exchanges aren't the answer. Companies simply factor that as a cost of business, even if it's a risk of cost, not a cost ultimately paid.
The fix for this sort of thing is jail time.
You mean I can buy an entire town for $3,000,000? That's not a lot of money for a bunch of buildings and some land.
So what do you do with a polluted site?
I can't think of any business model, but there has to be something...
Wind farm? Solar? Landfill?
Consumers will want longer lasting GPS than an Android phone for handheld stuff, at least some of the time.
Some consumers will want GPS navigation where Google doesn't have maps.
So no.
But this will drastically cut into sales of GPSs for people who fit the Android/cell phone niche well, and that is a lot of people.
The response will be some mergers in the GPS space, or just companies going out of business, and will make GPS manufacturers do two things:
1. Concentrate on handhelds more, over car-based systems -- car systems will still be a big deal and the flagship, but more attention will go into smaller devices you carry with you, like watches and hats/backpack attachements where they can compete much better.
2. GPS manufacturers will add building topo like you see in Korean GPSs when you drive in Seoul -- 3d reps of many of the buildings in a city.
3. GPSs manufacturers will look for cheaper data rate contracts based on being able to estimate the data flow from their devices better than an android phone can.
4. One GPS manufacturer will look to the iPhone to compete, establishing a partnership with Apple to keep all other GPSs navigation software out. It will pay Apple a LOT of money. Apple will later screw them somehow as iPhone sales drop.
And thus it was said "Lo -- It is a feature, not a bug," and all were pleased.
It used to be the case that a phenomenal percentage of nurses had one or more parents who were alcoholics. They were used to taking care of people with little reward.
Now we need more nurses, we pay more, this attracts people with different attributes, and we worry about not getting a self-selected group.
An interesting situation.
Maybe we should lower the pay of nurses, again, remove all taxes from alcohol and lay off a bunch of adults to encourage parental drinking? That would breed a new super-race of patient people with low expectations who'll take shit from doctors all day and still be nice to patients while wiping their butts.
Or we could work on better training for nurse candidates and a lot of role-play early in their education. That's another thought. Maybe not as good, but a possibility.
Mitochondrial evidence conclusively proves this isn't so. Never, not once, did a Neanderthal ever get his/her genes in the modern pool.
I think that means mitochondrial evidence is crap.
How did we get to look so different in so little time? Why do Neanderthals found in China has a bump on the top of the head that is common now in modern humans found in China and not common in non-China-area Neanderthals nor non-China-area modern humans? (This is a trivial-sounding example, but it's supposedly pretty easy to see in the remains.)
Why didn't any Ns get domesticated/preserved? Why isn't there one single place somewhere where MH didn't go but Ns did, even though Ns had so much longer than MHs to move around, and N remains are found pretty far and wide.
I just don't buy the mitochondrial proof that Ns didn't mate with MHs ever. Maybe they're right, but its not intutive.
They may agrue that one back and forth, with little data and no way to conclude anything, but there's a real obvious difference between us and them.
Our spine comes into our pelvis behind the hips. This means that the pelvis rocks as we walk and makes it possible for us to walk long distances without pain. Neanderthal's spine joined his pelvis right in line with his hips.
OUCH!
Neanderthal might have been as smart as us or smarter, or he might have lacked specialized brain functions like complex language abilities which we sport. Who cares? He accomplished nothing because he spent his whole life with a backache.
Has anyone found intelligently done benchmarks which pit Cortex A9-MP against Intel Atom?
Nice wolfie walks right around them, and past them and is on his way into the forest, and they blow his ass off unprovoked.
Bad Magic User! Bad Paladin! Bad whatever the heck your character was.
I'm only seeing a few quotes repeated in a few forms.
Given that there's a typo in the first line of the extract which is getting bandied about I'm especially uncomfortable calling/emailing/faxing my congresscritter to rip him a new one.
I want to see the whole thing, THEN I will rip him a new one.
Which would be a service to him, because apparently, his current one is plugged by the external sexual organs of our local ILEC and cable companies.
This is ultimately the reason why ILECs are so slow, bloated and inefficient. The more people they have doing manual (both technical and paperwork) tasks, the less automation they have and the slower and less profitable they are, but conversely, the more votes they seem to control and the more they can enforce legislative support for archaic business models (monopolies wherever possible) and behaviors on the politicians in each state. "If this passes, we'll have to lay people off. We'll lay your district people off, and we'll blame you." They repeat this threat over and over, like a monotone operator message recording.
Our congresspeople keep screwing us (and primarily their own district people) because they're frightened. This is why you should always think very carefully before ever siding with an ILEC on ANYTHING.
Roddenberry's bible on the original ST explicitly said that no solution to any plot issue/conflict may ever be resolved by a technological solution -- interpersonal relations/social behavior needed to resolve things.
This was thrown out in TNG, which is why it sucked monkies.
The best science fiction is represented by PKD, not Varley. It's the society and the people and ideas that matter in any fiction, not the gears and details of the tech.
You are utterly right: They need to read short fiction (no massive tomes) and to avoid Tolkien, beyond fragments (though they could possibly read the Hobbit) and they need to read "The Sleeper Awakes" by Wells.
HG Wells is nothing short of amazing -- his predictions are very, very astute.
But if you had to read just one book for a class like this, I'd recommend "When the Sleeper Awakes".
Once in blue canvas, always in blue canvas.
If they do a book by Card, clearly it should be Ender's game.
I think, personally, that it's his best book, but ignoring that, there are practical concerns: It's fastest paced book and will keep High Schoolers' attention. It's also one of his shortest books -- they wouldn't have time to read any of his others.
Unless you're reading at least something by Philip K. Dick, I think your class is not much of a class on the subject.
Philip defines not just science fiction in the modern age, but modern writing. The key to good science fiction is that the science is not important -- it's the science's impact on the society and the individual that is important. Phil knew nothing about science, which freed him to actually write.
Other writers, before him, came up with a tech idea and showed what it would do to society, but Phil came up with non-science nonsense and explored what that would do to society. He freed science fiction to move freely, instead of being anchored to ponderous rigor.
And then there's HG Wells. Why write SF? HG Wells looked at what the wars of his time did to people and society and came up with worlds where the tech around us destroyed the things we held sacred and pulled us into more and worse wars. Now we look back and think "Duh" because we are a much, much more cynical age -- thanks hugely to him. He showed us (as in The Food of The Gods) that all tech will be used for wars, no matter how non-military it might seem.
Didn't we all learn all we needed to do this in HIGH SCHOOL? Some of us learned to do it with less fissionable material in college.
It's just a matter of how good a job you want to do and how efficient you want to be.