Final thought of the day...from what I can understand, our solar system is rather young compared to other galaxies out there. And apparently there are hundreds of planets capable of supporting life (our life, that's not even counting life that forms in some environment we consider hostile)....Think about it.
Perhaps.. but I think the point you were trying to get at is that there most probably is e.t. life out there..
If you take the size of the universe into consideration, then the probability of life outside earth becomes much higher. It's the religious types that believe that we are some sort of special-case that only happened because of god. A more scientific treatment would lead one to realize that there's nothing particularly special about our existence or our home planet.
Just another ordinary planet in the middle of an ordinary galaxy. Since we can only measure time as a function of light-space since the last big-boom, then we can't really know if there's been several or an infinite number of big booms/implosions before us. We just don't have the capacity. Yes, the thought of aliens is pretty silly if you think of little green men. But if you think of it as the probability of life existing, then it should not be surprising to find that it is so.
Mod me -1 nutcase, but I have a photo of a UFO that was taken @ machu picchu, peru, a location which is known for its UFO sightings. Thing is, I would have been a total skeptic if this photo was never taken. The photo was actually supposed to be just a normal run-of-the-mill portrait of my uncle and his wife (this was back in the 70s). Once they developed the photo, though, low and behold there was a UFO hanging out between the mountains.
Since you might want to see this picture, here it is. I'll take the link offline if it gets tremendously slashdotted, but here it goes: ufo picture
Forcing software publishers to buy encryption certificates just so they can get their drive-by-downloads is one of the biggest things that sucks about IE.
Inconsequentially it's also a big money maker for MS and popup advertisers. IE 7.0 -- now with improved activex auto-installs!
As great as this sounds, I can't help but suspect that there will be a number of "improvements" that will make things even more hellish for anyone developing web apps and hoping to attain consistency across the browsers.
Java has nothing about it that makes it any more maintainable than any other language.
But, LISP, Python and Perl do have language _features_ that make it much more powerful to good programmers. Closures, anonymous functions. LISP has macros. Imagine java or C/etc without recursion. That's what Java is. A language without closures, macros and lambda. It's missing stuff!
Being that you contradicted yourself in your reply ("High/Low it's all relative" and later "COBOL is much higher level than C")... just want to set things straight here..
A language can definately be more powerful than another...
"Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.
And in fact, our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them. Of course he wouldn't program in machine language. That's what compilers are for. And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how anyone can get anything done with it. It doesn't even have x (Blub feature of your choice).
As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.
By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.
I know this from my own experience, as a high school kid writing programs in Basic. That language didn't even support recursion. It's hard to imagine writing programs without using recursion, but I didn't miss it at the time. I thought in Basic. And I was a whiz at it. Master of all I surveyed.
The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at various points on the power continuum. Where they fall relative to one another is a sensitive topic. What I will say is that I think Lisp is at the top. And to support this claim I'll tell you about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other four languages. How can you get anything done in them, I think, without macros?"
More like weed, kid toys and random old music you'd never think you'd hear again.....
it's kinda funny, the way the music scene's gone the last couple years..
i remember during the dot com boom everyone was vying to have their superstar dj grace the mainstream with a musical style underground artists had been making for years without their notice or attention.
a club around here (LA, the echo) is even trying to dedicate a night to "chip [mod] music"... errmm-- ha ha. fun to see if the LA music clique ever decides to try and take circuit bending mainstream. that'd be the day.. maybe it'd knock a few of those shitheads doing the airwave programming around here around enough to give them half a sense of musical taste (in the anti-anti musical headfuck sense)
anyways. small world. check out the fuckin tech-trip sound. http://absurdity.biz/~david/ you just might like it (bare with me as i prepare my server for a slashdot acid fry). pay derek a visit while you're there, too.. he's a cool cat if you meet em in person
There's also a tuning key that just drops the low E down to D with the flip of a switch . . . that one got used a fair bit.
My buddy actually has one of these on his Fender jazz bass. A really nice bass, in fact, and the tuning switch just makes it killer. If this new system can beat that, I'm sure there'll be legions of axe-handlers ready to get choppin
>The idea isn't to actually use the language but >rather to learn it to help you understand other >languages.
This is a great analogy, but I think you miss one simple point.
The best way to learn about programming languages is to work in a programmable programming language. And, you aren't going to really learn the high level concepts unless you use a truly high level language.
>It's like learning Latin. Nobody actually uses >it, but it can give you a deeper understanding >of the languages that are based on it.
And this is where the analogy is most true. If you really want to be a good coder, getting down the nitty gritty is good, but learning the high level concepts is even better. Now, a choice like LISP over asm for learning CS is probably a much better choice. LISP is to Latin as asm is to (insert simple but underexpressive language here)
1910 technology vs today's technology. Hell yes it is better, both for the environment and, heck, even on your pocketbook in terms of gas usage. If everyone in this damn state (cali) drove these, it is not unlikely that we could ween ourselves away from our relationship with the middle east...
Also.. WHY aren't there government subsidies for these? Businesses seem to be getting lots of tax credits these days. How about a tax credit for trading in a crappy gas-vehicle for one of these sweet puppies?...and you giggle about the 20 year old cobol program that still holding the payroll system together. Cars are ~100 years old. Why haven't we moved away towards this obviously superior technology as a whole? One word: False/Negative Marketing paid for by the rich fucks whose portfolios are padded with exxon, mobil, etc. Just think about it.
Writing your reps and voting them out of office if they don't "respond" can make cause for dramatic change.
The most important part is VOCALIZING and forming a strong clear opposition to Ginny Brown-Waite, Jim DeMint, Trent Franks, Christopher John, Charlie Norwood, Mike Pence, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mark E. Souder, John Sullivan, Thomas Tancredo, and those money grubbing fuckers in washington. ha. --votes;
cameras, paper, videotape, etc has all been used for the same purpose, and no one's making laws to limit them. Lofty and misguided laws such as these are Bad News.
Does anyone vote anymore? Anybody care to research who's been pushing this through on the front end? wonder what the slashdot effect could have on polls.. errm,,,, wait, already has (duh! h.dean) HA. care to guess who shouldn't be re-elected?
Rep Brown-Waite, Ginny - 9/5/2003 [FL-5] Rep DeMint, Jim - 7/24/2003 [SC-4] Rep Franks, Trent - 9/4/2003 [AZ-2] Rep John, Christopher - 7/24/2003 [LA-7] Rep Norwood, Charlie - 9/4/2003 [GA-9] Rep Pence, Mike - 7/24/2003 [IN-6] Rep Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana - 9/3/2003 [FL-18] Rep Souder, Mark E. - 7/25/2003 [IN-3] Rep Sullivan, John - 7/24/2003 [OK-1] Rep Tancredo, Thomas G. - 9/5/2003 [CO-6]
Thanks poster. Everyone, take notice who NOT to vote for.
Bush is so grassroots man.. I mean.. he had people going door-to-door in florida.... Busting people's balls to stop them from voting! Buahaaha!
And to add some spice to this, DEAN is practically a Republican by 60s democrat standards. If you're going to go democrat, go progressive. Dennis Kucinich is a breath of fresh air amongst the "progressive" left with which we are left to choose amongst today. Whatever man, as long as it's not Lieberman!
pro-environment
pro-peace
anti-war
anti-death-penalty
ANTI-NAFTA and ANTI-WTO what else could you ask for? You've probably never heard of Kucinich since they don't have the same $ budget. And I was just thinking.. you know, if they really wanted to get some good decent donations coming in, they should just advertise on slashdot!
...And I heard they were looking for grassroots 'linux people' to help with bringing their message online...
please mod parent up. Vote DEAN or whatever democrat runs in 2003. We never elected bush in the first place, and having him re-elected is just salt onto the wounds of smart americans and the international community. honestly, greens, libertarians, etc. are just votes wasted.
Did anyone else notice that the california clean-air mandate was toppled by oil/car business friendly bush? does anyone else care about our fuckin AIR?
p.s. dean voted against the war
Yes, but you are not a large evil corporations such as mcdonalds or any of the defense industry companies. You probably incorporated for tax and liability purposes, which is very good. I doubt the poster was thinking about people like you.
Maybe one of these days Congress will stop trying to prop up a failing business model by turning the US into a police state. But I'm not holding my breath...
I took a music publishing class which detailed all this stuff in gory detail. Average artists' cut on a new CD is ~$0.07. This cut gets even lower (read: as the limit approaches zero) if the album gets a lowered rating (decided by the label and is sold at a "discount" by the label (those 'bargain' bins you'll often see).
I would much rather have that experience on my resume as Java instead. Python is nice, but employers just aren't looking for it.
If the customer specifically requests java, then that is a different story altogether than lamenting over prior experience being spent on a project in language X over language Y. Clueless customers go with the flow (the buzzwords, etc) without understanding the technology. Do you really want them making your technical decisions for you?
I agree with you that I do not condone lying. But if you are in a situation ["What *really* matters (to me, anyway) is staying employed"] where you really need a job (kids, spouse, rent, etc), then something as trivial as what language a past project was coded in is truly irrelevant. In which case, I can understand someone increasing their chances by 'flipping bits' on their resume; I've seen countless resumes go down the trash shoot for plenty of other trivial reasons ("it looks ugly!!", etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Final thought of the day...from what I can understand, our solar system is rather young compared to other galaxies out there. And apparently there are hundreds of planets capable of supporting life (our life, that's not even counting life that forms in some environment we consider hostile)....Think about it.
Perhaps.. but I think the point you were trying to get at is that there most probably is e.t. life out there..
If you take the size of the universe into consideration, then the probability of life outside earth becomes much higher. It's the religious types that believe that we are some sort of special-case that only happened because of god. A more scientific treatment would lead one to realize that there's nothing particularly special about our existence or our home planet.
Just another ordinary planet in the middle of an ordinary galaxy. Since we can only measure time as a function of light-space since the last big-boom, then we can't really know if there's been several or an infinite number of big booms/implosions before us. We just don't have the capacity. Yes, the thought of aliens is pretty silly if you think of little green men. But if you think of it as the probability of life existing, then it should not be surprising to find that it is so.
Mod me -1 nutcase, but I have a photo of a UFO that was taken @ machu picchu, peru, a location which is known for its UFO sightings. Thing is, I would have been a total skeptic if this photo was never taken. The photo was actually supposed to be just a normal run-of-the-mill portrait of my uncle and his wife (this was back in the 70s). Once they developed the photo, though, low and behold there was a UFO hanging out between the mountains.
Since you might want to see this picture, here it is. I'll take the link offline if it gets tremendously slashdotted, but here it goes: ufo picture
And let's not forget ACTIVEX
Forcing software publishers to buy encryption certificates just so they can get their drive-by-downloads is one of the biggest things that sucks about IE.
Inconsequentially it's also a big money maker for MS and popup advertisers. IE 7.0 -- now with improved activex auto-installs!
As great as this sounds, I can't help but suspect that there will be a number of "improvements" that will make things even more hellish for anyone developing web apps and hoping to attain consistency across the browsers.
Are the _really_ going to fix the css box model?
Herd mentality.
Java has nothing about it that makes it any more maintainable than any other language.
But,
LISP, Python and Perl do have language _features_ that make it much more powerful to good programmers. Closures, anonymous functions. LISP has macros. Imagine java or C/etc without recursion. That's what Java is. A language without closures, macros and lambda. It's missing stuff!
cough -- cough, haha
.........
hold on.. you're gonna have to wait for me to stop laughing before I finish this post and make my point.
given MS' track record, I really think you're wildly off mark on that 99% figure.
Well.. actually maybe not *that* much tweaking.. check out this video. I swear.. the japanese must be 20 yrs ahead of the rest of the world.
t-shirt origami
damnnn......
Being that you contradicted yourself in your reply ("High/Low it's all relative" and later "COBOL is much higher level than C") ... just want to set things straight here..
A language can definately be more powerful than another...
"Programmers get very attached to their favorite languages, and I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so to explain this point I'm going to use a hypothetical language called Blub. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.
And in fact, our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them. Of course he wouldn't program in machine language. That's what compilers are for. And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how anyone can get anything done with it. It doesn't even have x (Blub feature of your choice).
As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.
By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.
I know this from my own experience, as a high school kid writing programs in Basic. That language didn't even support recursion. It's hard to imagine writing programs without using recursion, but I didn't miss it at the time. I thought in Basic. And I was a whiz at it. Master of all I surveyed.
The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at various points on the power continuum. Where they fall relative to one another is a sensitive topic. What I will say is that I think Lisp is at the top. And to support this claim I'll tell you about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other four languages. How can you get anything done in them, I think, without macros?"
http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
More like weed, kid toys and random old music you'd never think you'd hear again.....
it's kinda funny, the way the music scene's gone the last couple years..
i remember during the dot com boom everyone was vying to have their superstar dj grace the mainstream with a musical style underground artists had been making for years without their notice or attention.
a club around here (LA, the echo) is even trying to dedicate a night to "chip [mod] music"
anyways. small world. check out the fuckin tech-trip sound. http://absurdity.biz/~david/ you just might like it (bare with me as i prepare my server for a slashdot acid fry). pay derek a visit while you're there, too.. he's a cool cat if you meet em in person
peace
every try depositing a check?
There's also a tuning key that just drops the low E down to D with the flip of a switch . . . that one got used a fair bit.
....
My buddy actually has one of these on his Fender jazz bass. A really nice bass, in fact, and the tuning switch just makes it killer. If this new system can beat that, I'm sure there'll be legions of axe-handlers ready to get choppin
>The idea isn't to actually use the language but
>rather to learn it to help you understand other
>languages.
This is a great analogy, but I think you miss one simple point.
The best way to learn about programming languages is to work in a programmable programming language. And, you aren't going to really learn the high level concepts unless you use a truly high level language.
>It's like learning Latin. Nobody actually uses
>it, but it can give you a deeper understanding
>of the languages that are based on it.
And this is where the analogy is most true. If you really want to be a good coder, getting down the nitty gritty is good, but learning the high level concepts is even better. Now, a choice like LISP over asm for learning CS is probably a much better choice. LISP is to Latin as asm is to (insert simple but underexpressive language here)
Could it be possible that the earth has stopped expanding, and may be contracting in future?
I've found Sharity to be quite useful. It's "free" for single-server home use too....
How about turning this into a money saver for the average big-city american as well?
This'll be about as effective as...DARE
Uhhh dude.. i run linux and i've had no problems gettting flash to work in mozilla firebird for me.
get some facts straight
...should be:
...and you giggle about the 20 year old cobol program that still holding the payroll system together. Cars are ~100 years old. Why haven't we moved away towards this obviously superior technology as a whole? One word: False/Negative Marketing paid for by the rich fucks whose portfolios are padded with exxon, mobil, etc. Just think about it.
Why WOULDN'T you buy one of these?!
1910 technology vs today's technology. Hell yes it is better, both for the environment and, heck, even on your pocketbook in terms of gas usage. If everyone in this damn state (cali) drove these, it is not unlikely that we could ween ourselves away from our relationship with the middle east...
Also..
WHY aren't there government subsidies for these? Businesses seem to be getting lots of tax credits these days. How about a tax credit for trading in a crappy gas-vehicle for one of these sweet puppies?
Writing your reps and voting them out of office if they don't "respond" can make cause for dramatic change. The most important part is VOCALIZING and forming a strong clear opposition to Ginny Brown-Waite, Jim DeMint, Trent Franks, Christopher John, Charlie Norwood, Mike Pence, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mark E. Souder, John Sullivan, Thomas Tancredo, and those money grubbing fuckers in washington. ha. --votes;
...yeah probably is.
BUT
cameras, paper, videotape, etc has all been used for the same purpose, and no one's making laws to limit them. Lofty and misguided laws such as these are Bad News.
Does anyone vote anymore? Anybody care to research who's been pushing this through on the front end? wonder what the slashdot effect could have on polls.. errm,,,, wait, already has (duh! h.dean) HA. care to guess who shouldn't be re-elected?
Rep Brown-Waite, Ginny - 9/5/2003 [FL-5]
Rep DeMint, Jim - 7/24/2003 [SC-4]
Rep Franks, Trent - 9/4/2003 [AZ-2]
Rep John, Christopher - 7/24/2003 [LA-7]
Rep Norwood, Charlie - 9/4/2003 [GA-9]
Rep Pence, Mike - 7/24/2003 [IN-6]
Rep Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana - 9/3/2003 [FL-18]
Rep Souder, Mark E. - 7/25/2003 [IN-3]
Rep Sullivan, John - 7/24/2003 [OK-1]
Rep Tancredo, Thomas G. - 9/5/2003 [CO-6]
Thanks poster. Everyone, take notice who NOT to vote for.
Bush is so grassroots man.. I mean.. he had people going door-to-door in florida.... Busting people's balls to stop them from voting! Buahaaha!
And to add some spice to this, DEAN is practically a Republican by 60s democrat standards. If you're going to go democrat, go progressive. Dennis Kucinich is a breath of fresh air amongst the "progressive" left with which we are left to choose amongst today. Whatever man, as long as it's not Lieberman!
pro-environment
pro-peace
anti-war
anti-death-penalty
ANTI-NAFTA and ANTI-WTO
...And I heard they were looking for grassroots 'linux people' to help with bringing their message online...
what else could you ask for? You've probably never heard of Kucinich since they don't have the same $ budget. And I was just thinking.. you know, if they really wanted to get some good decent donations coming in, they should just advertise on slashdot!
-david
please mod parent up. Vote DEAN or whatever democrat runs in 2003. We never elected bush in the first place, and having him re-elected is just salt onto the wounds of smart americans and the international community. honestly, greens, libertarians, etc. are just votes wasted. Did anyone else notice that the california clean-air mandate was toppled by oil/car business friendly bush? does anyone else care about our fuckin AIR? p.s. dean voted against the war
Yes, but you are not a large evil corporations such as mcdonalds or any of the defense industry companies. You probably incorporated for tax and liability purposes, which is very good. I doubt the poster was thinking about people like you.
Maybe one of these days Congress will stop trying to prop up a failing business model by turning the US into a police state. But I'm not holding my breath...
too late. we already live in a police state
I took a music publishing class which detailed all this stuff in gory detail. Average artists' cut on a new CD is ~$0.07. This cut gets even lower (read: as the limit approaches zero) if the album gets a lowered rating (decided by the label and is sold at a "discount" by the label (those 'bargain' bins you'll often see).
I would much rather have that experience on my resume as Java instead. Python is nice, but employers just aren't looking for it.
If the customer specifically requests java, then that is a different story altogether than lamenting over prior experience being spent on a project in language X over language Y. Clueless customers go with the flow (the buzzwords, etc) without understanding the technology. Do you really want them making your technical decisions for you?
I agree with you that I do not condone lying. But if you are in a situation ["What *really* matters (to me, anyway) is staying employed"] where you really need a job (kids, spouse, rent, etc), then something as trivial as what language a past project was coded in is truly irrelevant. In which case, I can understand someone increasing their chances by 'flipping bits' on their resume; I've seen countless resumes go down the trash shoot for plenty of other trivial reasons ("it looks ugly!!", etc).