I believe you just posted the first comment ever which was ever voted to +5 insightful, whose only contribution to the discussion is a quote from "someone on 4chan".
Science and its requirements are dynamic, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the relationship between maths and biology.
When I was an undergraduate about 20 years ago, biology was the science you did if you liked science but didn't like maths. In the intervening years, largely thanks to the rise of bioinformatics, this is no longer true.
E.O. Wilson didn't need to have a mathematical background back in his day, but that day is now gone. We now have the technology to make quantifiable predictions, but there is a generation of biologists who don't even consult a statistician before designing an experiment.
So you're saying you'd be happier with the phone company tapping your phone than the NSA? Chances are the phone company is doing it for the NSA.
And, of course, it also works the other way around. If you don't think that corporations have bought and paid for enough politicians and staffers that they can cause loss of privacy, freedom and even death, then you haven't spent enough time on Slashdot.
There is something in what you say. In the 80s, they actually had devices for kids. You could by a kids' cassette player/recorder, for example, which was lower fidelity than a "real" one, but had bigger buttons, was more robust, and cost less.
Today, they do make kids' MP3 players. My kids have them, and they're a pretty good deal. However, they don't make touchscreen app devices for kids, and the existing options are woefully inadequate (e.g. in Jelly Bean 4.2, you can't buy an app for the device, only for a single user).
If it helps, consider this: The OFT is investigating because the market has failed. Making locked-down devices for kids is an obvious thing that would sell exceedingly well. The reason it hasn't happened is because predators make the store operators a lot of money.
The NSA had nothing, as far as we know, to do with the prosecution of Aaron Swartz.
I think you're over-estimating the amount of collusion between some of these government departments. That, after all, would require co-operation and competence.
The standard terminology appears to be that multi-core is not multi-CPU, and that's abundantly clear from the context of the thread.
The claim, you may recall, is that every multi-CPU machine sold is a NUMA architecture. That's patently untrue of almost all machines which feature multiple cores on one die.
Re:BSD folks must have even more terrible problem.
on
The 'Linux Inside' Stigma
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, we're happy to call it Linux, just not GNU/Linux.
I do have to wonder why the kernel is singled out for special treatment and not, say, WebKit (well, for the time being at least).
I think you really need to do both. The ideal first language would be a very high-level language which supports low-level programming (possibly with some cargo cult support). C is a fine language, but it is not that language.
Did you actually learn "how object orientation is done"? After reading the manual for Motif, would you have been ready (assuming you knew about all the other parts of compiler or interpreter design) to implement Sather, or CLOS, or Haskell's typeclass system?
"Object orientation" is an abstract notion. What you learned is one way to realise the abstraction in a real programming language. This is even true if the language has direct support for OO style. For example, C++ you typically implement "methods" with "member functions". That is one way to realise the abstract notion in the programming language, but it is not the only way, and sometimes not the best way (c.f. Qt).
I would argue that what you learned was a bunch of specific implementation details. Useful? Certainly. But details nonetheless.
I think you misunderstood my comment about Newton's equations. Applying F=ma to pretty much any real-world situation that isn't exceedingly trivial is much, much harder than most people think. You already need calculus to solve it, so the small amount about partial derivatives that you need to use the Euler-Lagrange equation is actually easier than doing the algebra. And the time is easily amortised over just a small number of physical modelling problems. IME, anyway.
Similarly, I would argue that it's easier to learn the relevant bits of C++ than to try to do anything nontrivial in C. It's a rite of passage, I'll grant you that, but it's also enough to turn people off programming.
Modern programming language features are not "simplifications", any more than currency is a "simplification" compared to barter, or a pen tablet is a "simplification" compared to a paint brush. They are advanced tools which enable you to control and manage complexity.
A first semester undergraduate subject which uses C is not really teaching software engineering or computer science, it's "introduction to the syntax and semantics of C". If you teach Haskell or Scheme first, you're really teaching computer science.
I deliberately didn't mention C, because modern thinking is that you should start at the top of the programming language hierarchy and work your way down, rather than the other way.
Warren Siegel famously pointed out that most physics textbooks are history books, basically covering physics in chronological order of discovery. Basing your programming knowledge on C is kind of like that. Real physicists, even those working in the non-relativistic limit, don't use Newton's laws directly. Not when we have Lagrange and Hamilton's equations.
It is the simplest useful programming language, in the sense that it gives you the thinnest possible layer of abstraction on top of assembly while still being an actual high-level programming language. C is uninteresting, both as an engineering platform and as a science platform.
That's not to say it's not useful; of course it is. But I'm not convinced that learning C will teach you anything (other than C) that you couldn't learn with, say, C++. C++, after all, almost contains C as a subset.
The era when the most important thing you need from a programming language is to give you an abstraction on top of assembly is... well, it's not gone, but it's become a very specialist task. The primary job of a programming language today, for most people, is to support engineering. Real programs are multi-layered, and only the lowest layers are written in C style. Every good programmer needs to be able to do it, but every good programmer needs to spend most of their time not doing it.
It's not exactly working hard, though. Like good programmers, good lawyers like their job so much that they are willing to do at least some of it for free if it's for a good enough cause.
Slashdot Mirror
I only regularly visit one .cx, though.
Maybe they're firing all the people who bet their careers on the Cell?
Yes, I've seen those. PDB is admittedly hard to screw up thanks to the fact that it's just a matrix. I actually had FASTQ in mind when I wrote that.
I believe you just posted the first comment ever which was ever voted to +5 insightful, whose only contribution to the discussion is a quote from "someone on 4chan".
You win the Internet for today.
Well, if it had started here instead of 4chan, that's exactly what it would be called.
But yeah, I can totally see protestors in Natalie Portman masks, doin' it for the hot grits.
I don't know about C#, but JVM bytecode makes a lot more sense if you write the theorem prover first.
Science and its requirements are dynamic, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the relationship between maths and biology.
When I was an undergraduate about 20 years ago, biology was the science you did if you liked science but didn't like maths. In the intervening years, largely thanks to the rise of bioinformatics, this is no longer true.
E.O. Wilson didn't need to have a mathematical background back in his day, but that day is now gone. We now have the technology to make quantifiable predictions, but there is a generation of biologists who don't even consult a statistician before designing an experiment.
If biologist-designed file formats are anything to go by, both Java and C# are likely to be an improvement over whatever they come up with.
I don't know who voted that down, but there's a good point in there: the Westboro Baptist Church can't be in two places at once.
That's a fair point. My comments were mostly directed at people engaging in menological pareidolia.
(Yes, I just made that phrase up. You're welcome, Internet.)
I need to correct you on a point of history.
The Boston tea party was not carried out by terrorists. It was carried out by smugglers.
Every day on the calendar is an anniversary of something.
So you're saying you'd be happier with the phone company tapping your phone than the NSA? Chances are the phone company is doing it for the NSA.
And, of course, it also works the other way around. If you don't think that corporations have bought and paid for enough politicians and staffers that they can cause loss of privacy, freedom and even death, then you haven't spent enough time on Slashdot.
There is something in what you say. In the 80s, they actually had devices for kids. You could by a kids' cassette player/recorder, for example, which was lower fidelity than a "real" one, but had bigger buttons, was more robust, and cost less.
Today, they do make kids' MP3 players. My kids have them, and they're a pretty good deal. However, they don't make touchscreen app devices for kids, and the existing options are woefully inadequate (e.g. in Jelly Bean 4.2, you can't buy an app for the device, only for a single user).
If it helps, consider this: The OFT is investigating because the market has failed. Making locked-down devices for kids is an obvious thing that would sell exceedingly well. The reason it hasn't happened is because predators make the store operators a lot of money.
The NSA had nothing, as far as we know, to do with the prosecution of Aaron Swartz.
I think you're over-estimating the amount of collusion between some of these government departments. That, after all, would require co-operation and competence.
The standard terminology appears to be that multi-core is not multi-CPU, and that's abundantly clear from the context of the thread.
The claim, you may recall, is that every multi-CPU machine sold is a NUMA architecture. That's patently untrue of almost all machines which feature multiple cores on one die.
Oh, we're happy to call it Linux, just not GNU/Linux.
I do have to wonder why the kernel is singled out for special treatment and not, say, WebKit (well, for the time being at least).
Where do I start on all the ways that a dictionary argument can be wrong?
Having said that, you do have a point. Looking back on the thread, there are three distinct senses of the word "rational" being employed:
All of these claims are true if you pick the definition of "rational" to suit each claim.
I think you really need to do both. The ideal first language would be a very high-level language which supports low-level programming (possibly with some cargo cult support). C is a fine language, but it is not that language.
Did you actually learn "how object orientation is done"? After reading the manual for Motif, would you have been ready (assuming you knew about all the other parts of compiler or interpreter design) to implement Sather, or CLOS, or Haskell's typeclass system?
"Object orientation" is an abstract notion. What you learned is one way to realise the abstraction in a real programming language. This is even true if the language has direct support for OO style. For example, C++ you typically implement "methods" with "member functions". That is one way to realise the abstract notion in the programming language, but it is not the only way, and sometimes not the best way (c.f. Qt).
I would argue that what you learned was a bunch of specific implementation details. Useful? Certainly. But details nonetheless.
Most machines aren't multi-CPU machines.
I think you misunderstood my comment about Newton's equations. Applying F=ma to pretty much any real-world situation that isn't exceedingly trivial is much, much harder than most people think. You already need calculus to solve it, so the small amount about partial derivatives that you need to use the Euler-Lagrange equation is actually easier than doing the algebra. And the time is easily amortised over just a small number of physical modelling problems. IME, anyway.
Similarly, I would argue that it's easier to learn the relevant bits of C++ than to try to do anything nontrivial in C. It's a rite of passage, I'll grant you that, but it's also enough to turn people off programming.
Modern programming language features are not "simplifications", any more than currency is a "simplification" compared to barter, or a pen tablet is a "simplification" compared to a paint brush. They are advanced tools which enable you to control and manage complexity.
A first semester undergraduate subject which uses C is not really teaching software engineering or computer science, it's "introduction to the syntax and semantics of C". If you teach Haskell or Scheme first, you're really teaching computer science.
They ultimately made their way out of development for the most part. Nonetheless, my point stands: they're the ones who made the seriously big bucks.
I deliberately didn't mention C, because modern thinking is that you should start at the top of the programming language hierarchy and work your way down, rather than the other way.
Warren Siegel famously pointed out that most physics textbooks are history books, basically covering physics in chronological order of discovery. Basing your programming knowledge on C is kind of like that. Real physicists, even those working in the non-relativistic limit, don't use Newton's laws directly. Not when we have Lagrange and Hamilton's equations.
It is the simplest useful programming language, in the sense that it gives you the thinnest possible layer of abstraction on top of assembly while still being an actual high-level programming language. C is uninteresting, both as an engineering platform and as a science platform.
That's not to say it's not useful; of course it is. But I'm not convinced that learning C will teach you anything (other than C) that you couldn't learn with, say, C++. C++, after all, almost contains C as a subset.
The era when the most important thing you need from a programming language is to give you an abstraction on top of assembly is... well, it's not gone, but it's become a very specialist task. The primary job of a programming language today, for most people, is to support engineering. Real programs are multi-layered, and only the lowest layers are written in C style. Every good programmer needs to be able to do it, but every good programmer needs to spend most of their time not doing it.
It's not exactly working hard, though. Like good programmers, good lawyers like their job so much that they are willing to do at least some of it for free if it's for a good enough cause.