Capitalisation is very arbitrary and it drives me nuts.
Sometimes it's arbitrary, but much of the time it is not. Capitalisation is one of the cues by which we disambiguate written language. Get it wrong, and you can cause unnecessary confusion. Compare "catholic" with "Catholic", for example.
In non-western alphabets such a thing doesn't even exist.
That's strictly true, but also highly misleading.
No non-Western writing system of which I am aware has capitalisation, but some have features that are close enough. Each letter in Arabic script has four forms (initial, medial, final and isolated), compared with our paltry two (upper and lower case). Or how about the distinction between hiragana and katakana in Japanese?
ps, i weep that you will never know the beauty of an e e cummings poem
Speaking only for myself, I happily accept nonstandard grammar, spelling or punctuation if there is a clear attempt at creativity behind it. It needn't be anywhere near as good as E.E. Cummings' poetry or James Joyce's prose; few are capable of that. A good use of language does not have to be a correct use of language, where "correct" is measured against your favourite style guide.
I also don't have a problem with nonstandard language to overcome a limitation of the medium, such as the 140 character limit or the ergonomics of many mobile devices. I also concede cultural conventions, such as the conversational characteristics of comments. In addition, you often can't assume that someone is writing in their native language.
Having said all that, using "correct" language is fundamentally a matter of courtesy. By using "correct" spelling, good grammar and correct punctuation, you are saying to your reader that you understand that they don't have to read what you say, and so you are going to do them the courtesy of making it easy for them to do so. If you, as a speaker or writer, signal that you don't care about me, then I don't care about what you have to say.
I don't mind a creative writer who plays with language. They, at least, are trying to reward me for the extra effort I have to expend to read it. If it's not my cup of fur, I appreciate that others will enjoy it and I appreciate that you tried.
The invasion of Iraq was justified with a lot of rhetoric that blamed "religious extremism."
It was also justified with a lot of rhetoric about "freedom" and "democracy", but for some reason we don't blame "freedom" or "democracy" for all the violence.
Of course, in the right-wing echo chamber, all the talk about "freedom" and "democracy" went straight out of the window during the Arab Spring. Home-grown freedom and democracy movements were, all of a sudden, extremist plots. But that's a rant for another time.
Germany = statist ersatz-religion, Russia = statist ersatz-religion
But in fact, the WW2 is mostly remarkable for the death rate (i.e. deaths per unit time). By raw body count, the most bloodthirsty regime in history was China under Mao.
Meanwhile, any muslim you meet in the states is almost certainly a non-violent person.
Incidentally, that's also true of the Islamic world. If you are a Muslim, you are far more likely to be the victim of an Islamist terrorist than you are to be an Islamist terrorist or sympathiser thereof. That's partly because Islamist terrorists mostly target Muslims.
The "religion of peace" also spawned the Arab Spring.
Don't forget that they scrubbed "muslim" off his grave. And other muslims in the region are expected to go out of their way to persecute them.
This, incidentally, highlights a key point in understanding Wahhabism and Qutbism. However much you think that this particular brand of Islamism is a threat to the West, you're far more likely to be killed, persecuted or generally targeted by them if you're Muslim.
To put it another way, the fact that Al Qaeda and the Taliban is far more of a threat to Islam than to anything else could be considered evidence that (mainstream) Islam is a religion of peace. That's why they hate it so much.
Thats nice, hate to break it to you but Linux is still a huge minority even in the science/research realm.
That's because most scientists' computing demands can be satisfied by a moderately-sized spreadsheet. When it can't, a small amount of Matlab or R will do the trick.
Linux has the edge where it counts: high-performance computing. If you have a metric crapload of data to crunch, and it's not the sort of problem that fits neatly onto special-purpose architectures (e.g. BlueGene), Linux is it.
Peter Higgs didn't name the mechanism. He only theorised about the family of "Lorentz-covariant field theories in which spontaneous breakdown of symmetry under an internal Lie group occurs".
(Yes, that's a direct quote from his second paper.)
You're not the first misconceived person that I've had to refute about this.
On the contrary, I've done a lot of multithreaded and lock-free programming, and I used to write compilers for a living. I very much know what volatile does, and I know that it's almost useless for multithreaded programming.
I say "almost" because it effectively did the job on older architectures which enforced a total ordering on memory operations. Admittedly, it works if you only ever run your multithreaded programs on a single CPU; this does happen, especially in embedded environments. On the minus side, it's positively dangerous for any situation which assumes that loads and stores are issued and completed in the same order that you wrote them.
Thankfully, there is a simple way to achieve what you actually want: use _Atomic (in C) or std::atomic (in C++).
Interestingly, there have been test cases to this effect in Commonwealth countries. There was a famous test case to this effect in Australia, where someone fired a gun on one side of a state border (much of the decision was to decide precisely where the border was) and killed a person who was on the other side.
The murder, it was ruled, happened in the state where the victim was shot.
While I agree that the standard library is mostly useless (for instance C++11 specifically supports threads but none of the standard containers supports the volatile qualifier (I'm sure someone will comment on this too, and I'll have to demonstrate, again, why volatile is still required for multithreaded development)), some of your points result from a lack of understanding of the language.
You know the rule of the Internet that says that every spelling flame must contain a spelling mistake? Well, you don't seem to understand what "volatile" means.
The problem isn't writing the for_each, it's writing "bar". Even most seasoned C++ users will readily admit that for_each was pretty useless before lambdas. I'm definitely going to be using it in the future, once compiler support has been rolled out sufficiently widely.
If by "algorithms" you mean "functors", I completely agree with you. If you actually meant "algorithms", then I don't understand what you're talking about.
Is it a big problem? I think I had a design once where it made sense, but I can't for the life of me remember even what the domain was.
The last time I used it was to implement a bridge pattern.
In case you've paged it out, a bridge pattern is useful for situations when you have two incompatible inheritance hierarchies, and you need to implement one in terms of the other. The classic real world example is Java AWT, which specifies its own hierarchy of GUI widgets, but they need to be implemented in terms of a native, almost certainly incompatible, inheritance hierarchy.
Best practice for implementing the back end of the bridge is to inherit from abstract base classes (interfaces in Java) which reflect the structure of the front end and concrete classes which reflect the structure of the back end. For anything moderately complex, you inevitably end up with the ABCs multiply inherited in diamond patterns.
C++ has a fairly decent work-around here, namely, to inherit the base classes virtually. Even better would be if the inheritance hierarchies produced by GUI API designers weren't so unnecessarily complex to begin with, but that's another story.
This is admittedly a highly specialist usage. Nonetheless, I wouldn't want to lose the ability to do this. You could mandate that classes at the top of a diamond must be ABCs or virtually inherited. That would solve the semantic problem, but C programmers would just complain that the standard was even more complex than it used to be.
*The iostream libraries. I don't think I've ever seen code that didn't say fuck that and just use C style stdio.
Oddly enough, I've lost count of the number of C programs which either rolled their own or use a third-party stdio replacement like SFIO.
With stdio, moderately easy stuff is easy, and anything harder is impossible. With iostreams, moderately easy stuff is moderately easy, moderately east stuff is moderately difficult, and truly difficult stuff is possible.
Well, I like the type safety of the C++ library.
I like the abstraction layer. You try transparently decompressing a gzipped file with stdio some time!
The formatting stinks and is really painful to use.
That it does. And don't get me started on the "support" for i18n.
I don't know how things work in Utah, but where I live, the state fire department declares that on certain days (based on the predicted temperature and humidity) that nobody may light fires in the open air. That includes incinerators, camp fires or what have you. Practically nobody intends for their camp fire to get out of control. Nobody of consequence wants to ban camping or the use of camp fires. Nonetheless, camp fires are regulated on days where there is a serious risk of them getting out of control.
It seems, to me, completely irrational not to impose the same restriction on target shooting.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalisation is very arbitrary and it drives me nuts.
Sometimes it's arbitrary, but much of the time it is not. Capitalisation is one of the cues by which we disambiguate written language. Get it wrong, and you can cause unnecessary confusion. Compare "catholic" with "Catholic", for example.
In non-western alphabets such a thing doesn't even exist.
That's strictly true, but also highly misleading.
No non-Western writing system of which I am aware has capitalisation, but some have features that are close enough. Each letter in Arabic script has four forms (initial, medial, final and isolated), compared with our paltry two (upper and lower case). Or how about the distinction between hiragana and katakana in Japanese?
ps, i weep that you will never know the beauty of an e e cummings poem
Speaking only for myself, I happily accept nonstandard grammar, spelling or punctuation if there is a clear attempt at creativity behind it. It needn't be anywhere near as good as E.E. Cummings' poetry or James Joyce's prose; few are capable of that. A good use of language does not have to be a correct use of language, where "correct" is measured against your favourite style guide.
I also don't have a problem with nonstandard language to overcome a limitation of the medium, such as the 140 character limit or the ergonomics of many mobile devices. I also concede cultural conventions, such as the conversational characteristics of comments. In addition, you often can't assume that someone is writing in their native language.
Having said all that, using "correct" language is fundamentally a matter of courtesy. By using "correct" spelling, good grammar and correct punctuation, you are saying to your reader that you understand that they don't have to read what you say, and so you are going to do them the courtesy of making it easy for them to do so. If you, as a speaker or writer, signal that you don't care about me, then I don't care about what you have to say.
I don't mind a creative writer who plays with language. They, at least, are trying to reward me for the extra effort I have to expend to read it. If it's not my cup of fur, I appreciate that others will enjoy it and I appreciate that you tried.
The invasion of Iraq was justified with a lot of rhetoric that blamed "religious extremism."
It was also justified with a lot of rhetoric about "freedom" and "democracy", but for some reason we don't blame "freedom" or "democracy" for all the violence.
Of course, in the right-wing echo chamber, all the talk about "freedom" and "democracy" went straight out of the window during the Arab Spring. Home-grown freedom and democracy movements were, all of a sudden, extremist plots. But that's a rant for another time.
If we're only counting Al Qaeda and its franchises, this is correct. They kill more Muslims than non-Muslims by around a factor of eight.
Germany = statist ersatz-religion, Russia = statist ersatz-religion
But in fact, the WW2 is mostly remarkable for the death rate (i.e. deaths per unit time). By raw body count, the most bloodthirsty regime in history was China under Mao.
Meanwhile, any muslim you meet in the states is almost certainly a non-violent person.
Incidentally, that's also true of the Islamic world. If you are a Muslim, you are far more likely to be the victim of an Islamist terrorist than you are to be an Islamist terrorist or sympathiser thereof. That's partly because Islamist terrorists mostly target Muslims.
The "religion of peace" also spawned the Arab Spring.
Don't forget that they scrubbed "muslim" off his grave. And other muslims in the region are expected to go out of their way to persecute them.
This, incidentally, highlights a key point in understanding Wahhabism and Qutbism. However much you think that this particular brand of Islamism is a threat to the West, you're far more likely to be killed, persecuted or generally targeted by them if you're Muslim.
To put it another way, the fact that Al Qaeda and the Taliban is far more of a threat to Islam than to anything else could be considered evidence that (mainstream) Islam is a religion of peace. That's why they hate it so much.
The day that Slashdot makes a change which breaks compatibility with uncool platforms is the day it stops being "news for nerds".
BTW, can you do a Beowulf cluster of Galaxy Tabs?
Same with bioinformatics, FWIW. Everyone at the conferences either has a Macbook, an iPad or a netbook running Ubuntu.
Thats nice, hate to break it to you but Linux is still a huge minority even in the science/research realm.
That's because most scientists' computing demands can be satisfied by a moderately-sized spreadsheet. When it can't, a small amount of Matlab or R will do the trick.
Linux has the edge where it counts: high-performance computing. If you have a metric crapload of data to crunch, and it's not the sort of problem that fits neatly onto special-purpose architectures (e.g. BlueGene), Linux is it.
Thankfully, the analogous problem with Jell-O(R) was solved 25 years ago.
Peter Higgs didn't name the mechanism. He only theorised about the family of "Lorentz-covariant field theories in which spontaneous breakdown of symmetry under an internal Lie group occurs".
(Yes, that's a direct quote from his second paper.)
On the contrary, I've done a lot of multithreaded and lock-free programming, and I used to write compilers for a living. I very much know what volatile does, and I know that it's almost useless for multithreaded programming.
I say "almost" because it effectively did the job on older architectures which enforced a total ordering on memory operations. Admittedly, it works if you only ever run your multithreaded programs on a single CPU; this does happen, especially in embedded environments. On the minus side, it's positively dangerous for any situation which assumes that loads and stores are issued and completed in the same order that you wrote them.
Thankfully, there is a simple way to achieve what you actually want: use _Atomic (in C) or std::atomic (in C++).
Interestingly, there have been test cases to this effect in Commonwealth countries. There was a famous test case to this effect in Australia, where someone fired a gun on one side of a state border (much of the decision was to decide precisely where the border was) and killed a person who was on the other side.
The murder, it was ruled, happened in the state where the victim was shot.
While I agree that the standard library is mostly useless (for instance C++11 specifically supports threads but none of the standard containers supports the volatile qualifier (I'm sure someone will comment on this too, and I'll have to demonstrate, again, why volatile is still required for multithreaded development)), some of your points result from a lack of understanding of the language.
You know the rule of the Internet that says that every spelling flame must contain a spelling mistake? Well, you don't seem to understand what "volatile" means.
The problem isn't writing the for_each, it's writing "bar". Even most seasoned C++ users will readily admit that for_each was pretty useless before lambdas. I'm definitely going to be using it in the future, once compiler support has been rolled out sufficiently widely.
If by "algorithms" you mean "functors", I completely agree with you. If you actually meant "algorithms", then I don't understand what you're talking about.
*Diamond inheritance (just make it illegal)
Is it a big problem? I think I had a design once where it made sense, but I can't for the life of me remember even what the domain was.
The last time I used it was to implement a bridge pattern.
In case you've paged it out, a bridge pattern is useful for situations when you have two incompatible inheritance hierarchies, and you need to implement one in terms of the other. The classic real world example is Java AWT, which specifies its own hierarchy of GUI widgets, but they need to be implemented in terms of a native, almost certainly incompatible, inheritance hierarchy.
Best practice for implementing the back end of the bridge is to inherit from abstract base classes (interfaces in Java) which reflect the structure of the front end and concrete classes which reflect the structure of the back end. For anything moderately complex, you inevitably end up with the ABCs multiply inherited in diamond patterns.
C++ has a fairly decent work-around here, namely, to inherit the base classes virtually. Even better would be if the inheritance hierarchies produced by GUI API designers weren't so unnecessarily complex to begin with, but that's another story.
This is admittedly a highly specialist usage. Nonetheless, I wouldn't want to lose the ability to do this. You could mandate that classes at the top of a diamond must be ABCs or virtually inherited. That would solve the semantic problem, but C programmers would just complain that the standard was even more complex than it used to be.
Oddly enough, I've lost count of the number of C programs which either rolled their own or use a third-party stdio replacement like SFIO.
With stdio, moderately easy stuff is easy, and anything harder is impossible. With iostreams, moderately easy stuff is moderately easy, moderately east stuff is moderately difficult, and truly difficult stuff is possible.
Well, I like the type safety of the C++ library.
I like the abstraction layer. You try transparently decompressing a gzipped file with stdio some time!
The formatting stinks and is really painful to use.
That it does. And don't get me started on the "support" for i18n.
Enough times that I've lost count. You probably have too, you just don't realise it.
How many times have you written code like this?
const char* markText = "";
unsigned value = data.unmarkedValue;
if (data.flags & MARK)
{
value = data.markedValue;
markText = " (marked)";
}
printf(" %d%s\n", value, markText);
After an incident involving a certain microwave casserole, I don't think he's invited any more.
Yes. Less than a week ago, as a matter of fact.
I've also been to Richmond. But "we ARE Vietnam" would be overstating it considerably.
I've also lived in Carlton, and "we ARE Italy" is beyond a stretch.
Dude, we ARE multicultural. And we're one of the select places on the planet who have managed to make it work pretty well.
Sadly, science funding very much depends on public opinion. No political will, no science.
What if it caused an industrial accident in a US factory?
I don't know how things work in Utah, but where I live, the state fire department declares that on certain days (based on the predicted temperature and humidity) that nobody may light fires in the open air. That includes incinerators, camp fires or what have you. Practically nobody intends for their camp fire to get out of control. Nobody of consequence wants to ban camping or the use of camp fires. Nonetheless, camp fires are regulated on days where there is a serious risk of them getting out of control.
It seems, to me, completely irrational not to impose the same restriction on target shooting.
Or it's the dual object of a deacadamy.