Erlang actually owes more to Linda and Prolog than to languages that we usually think of as "functional" (like the Lisp/Scheme family and the ISWIM family). But still, Erlang is functional in the same way that Java is object-oriented and C++ is generic.
If you've ever programmed in a "true" object-oriented language, like Smalltalk or Eiffel, Java seems clunky. If you've ever used a programming language with "true" parametric polymorphism, like ML or Haskell, C++ seems clunky. (Actually, they seem clunky even if you haven't, but that's another story.)
It makes sense to say that Java supports object-oriented programming and C++ supports parametric polymorphism. Erlang supports functional programming in the same way.
As premature as that particular prize was, at least President Obama has "promoted peace conferences", which is in literal accordance with Alfred Nobel's will.
Torvalds specifically deserves one for Peace, for building and sustaining an international community that benefits millions and contributes to international understanding.
Allow me to quote Alfred Nobel's will:
[...] and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
And before you respond: No, OSCON is not a peace congress.
I forgot to mention that another movie from 1984, 2010, used CGI for the "monolith swarm" sequence.
The first uses of CGI in television were, of course, the "flying logos" of the early 80s, but I don't think this is what you meant. (Note that in the very early 80s, "flying logos" used all sorts of techniques, only one of which was wireframe CGI.)
The first CGI used in a feature length movie was in Westworld (1973). Other notable uses are Futureworld (1976), The Black Hole (1979), Alien (1979), Looker (1981) and Tron (1982).
For my money, though, the biggest breakthrough was in 1984, with two movies which used what we would now think of as CGI visual effects (The Last Starfighter and Young Sherlock Holmes). If you don't count the star field warp effect in Star Wars, this was the first time that computers were used to produce the look of something in the "real world", as opposed to a computer display.
Bloom filters are not as useful as they once were for large-scale indexing. As memory sizes increase, the tradeoff between precision and space efficiency changes. It's just as easy to distribute a hash table or a radix trie across multiple machines these days.
A more common modern use is when you have data which is logically tabular, with potentially many "columns" which can contain arbitrary-sized objects, but the table is expected to be sparse. Traditional SQL table representations rely on predetermined maximum sizes for data values to optimise their representation, which is inappropriate for this because it would waste space. However, you also don't want to waste time accessing disk to find that a value isn't there. Using a Bloom filter costs a small amount of space (enough to fit in a small "descriptor") but can potentially save a huge number of disk seeks.
We will indeed be challenging this illegal law in court, but it was right to ask the question beforehand instead of remaining silent.
Just to make things clear, have you yet challenged the legal status of the standing army that the United States has? As you should know, that is contrary to the framers' intent, too.
I don't know, but I think it's high time someone did something about those homo rhodesiensis bastards who are stealing all our jobs. Bloody non-union mammoth hunters.
But I'd much rather fund them through taxes than have a massive patent system.
Then write to your MP, asking them to increase funding for the CSIRO (throw in all othe other agencies such as ACIAR, AIMS, ANSTO, NMI, Geoscience Australia and NICTA while you're at it) so that they don't have to rely on patent licensing and commercial spinoffs.
(Disclaimer: I work for one of those agencies, though not the CSIRO.)
Yea, and its a *really* difficult concept when it doesn't even make any sense.
If you look back in the thread, you will discover that I was replying to someone who claimed that "software freedom doesn't include restrictions on naming". Once you get that piece of context, it should all make sense.
I tacitly assumed that it was common knowledge that Linux was trademarked for perfectly good reasons, and that everybody would pick up on this. I apologise for misjudging the company I keep.
Use Boost. It's a very liberally-licensed, high-quality library from the people who created the C++ language itself. It contains a ton of cross-platform libraries that do lots of useful things, from threads to regular expressions to writing testsuites and parsing command-line options. If Boost provides a piece of functionality, there's very little reason not to use its version.
Agreed, but you left out one crucial reason: If you use Boost today, this maximises your chances that your code won't need very much porting to work with the C++ standard library of tomorrow.
Use autoconf [...]
I'd like to agree here, but IME autoconf and Boost.Build don't work so nicely together.
That's correct. Boost has the most stringent code review practices of probably any open source project.
This seems like an anti-open-source thing to do, but it's critical considering what Boost has to do. It's partly that library of infrastructure that all serious C++ projects need before they start, and partly the place where additions to the standard library are born. Boost development is slow, but Boost code is bulletproof.
If you think that fast and cheap DNA reading applies only (or even mostly) to monitoring of individuals, you do not have a real grasp of the scope and applicability of DNA sequencing.
For most extant species on the planet, we don't even know how many chromosomes they have, let alone having sequenced them. This will speed things up enormously.
Because when The Man came around with the intention of rounding up Japanese-American citizens in WW2, gun owners everywhere stopped it happening. Just like today they are preventing over-reaching border search, the rampant illegal search and seizure in the "war on drugs" and a host of other civil rights violations which might otherwise go on every day.
Be glad you have a right to bear arms. If you didn't, you might end up with a government that doesn't respect civil rights.
While Prof. Hollaar is completely wrong that the Curry-Howard isomorphism is "cosmetic", I don't think it's actually relevant to this case.
C-H shows (handwave handwave) that types are the same thing as theorems and programs are the same thing as proofs.
So consider a program that sorts integers. It takes a list of elements (int list in ML, or [Integer] in Haskell) and returns a list of elements (same). So the theorem that sort proves is, in Haskell-like notation:
[Integer] -> [Integer]
Any program that has this type signature serves as a proof of the theorem, including the identity function and the function which ignores its argument and returns the empty list.
So patenting software does not prevent you from proving certain theorems. At most, it would prevent you from using certain proof techniques. But that's a tautology.
The more crucial argument is what RedHat and the SFLC brought up: Software patents prevent the "little guys" from competing with the "big guys". The Internet is only as functional and innovative as it is because the "little guys" were allowed to write functional, innovative software. Lock them out, and the speed of innovation of the Internet slows down to a crawl.
This, of course, is on top of the undeniable point that any other conclusion would be flatly contradictory to every other ruling of the SCOTUS on this point.
I am not an expert in the field or otherwise well-informed about the subject matter at hand, but it seems to me the major differences here are that it's wireless and that it communicates with a glasses-mounted camera that would hopefully be less obvious to a casual observer than the Borg-like implants that have been used to provide limited sight to the blind in the past.
So how is this different from the same thing that everyone is working on? Including, I might add, a consortium which includes the group who invented the cochlear implant.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
Erlang actually owes more to Linda and Prolog than to languages that we usually think of as "functional" (like the Lisp/Scheme family and the ISWIM family). But still, Erlang is functional in the same way that Java is object-oriented and C++ is generic.
If you've ever programmed in a "true" object-oriented language, like Smalltalk or Eiffel, Java seems clunky. If you've ever used a programming language with "true" parametric polymorphism, like ML or Haskell, C++ seems clunky. (Actually, they seem clunky even if you haven't, but that's another story.)
It makes sense to say that Java supports object-oriented programming and C++ supports parametric polymorphism. Erlang supports functional programming in the same way.
Linus Pauling had his moments.
As premature as that particular prize was, at least President Obama has "promoted peace conferences", which is in literal accordance with Alfred Nobel's will.
Torvalds specifically deserves one for Peace, for building and sustaining an international community that benefits millions and contributes to international understanding.
Allow me to quote Alfred Nobel's will:
[...] and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
And before you respond: No, OSCON is not a peace congress.
I forgot to mention that another movie from 1984, 2010, used CGI for the "monolith swarm" sequence.
The first uses of CGI in television were, of course, the "flying logos" of the early 80s, but I don't think this is what you meant. (Note that in the very early 80s, "flying logos" used all sorts of techniques, only one of which was wireframe CGI.)
The first CGI used in a feature length movie was in Westworld (1973). Other notable uses are Futureworld (1976), The Black Hole (1979), Alien (1979), Looker (1981) and Tron (1982).
For my money, though, the biggest breakthrough was in 1984, with two movies which used what we would now think of as CGI visual effects (The Last Starfighter and Young Sherlock Holmes). If you don't count the star field warp effect in Star Wars, this was the first time that computers were used to produce the look of something in the "real world", as opposed to a computer display.
Bloom filters are not as useful as they once were for large-scale indexing. As memory sizes increase, the tradeoff between precision and space efficiency changes. It's just as easy to distribute a hash table or a radix trie across multiple machines these days.
A more common modern use is when you have data which is logically tabular, with potentially many "columns" which can contain arbitrary-sized objects, but the table is expected to be sparse. Traditional SQL table representations rely on predetermined maximum sizes for data values to optimise their representation, which is inappropriate for this because it would waste space. However, you also don't want to waste time accessing disk to find that a value isn't there. Using a Bloom filter costs a small amount of space (enough to fit in a small "descriptor") but can potentially save a huge number of disk seeks.
You're 222 years too late for that.
Just to make things clear, have you yet challenged the legal status of the standing army that the United States has? As you should know, that is contrary to the framers' intent, too.
It makes me wonder if things would have gone better if it had been built according to the Emperor's instructions.
I don't know, but I think it's high time someone did something about those homo rhodesiensis bastards who are stealing all our jobs. Bloody non-union mammoth hunters.
Then write to your MP, asking them to increase funding for the CSIRO (throw in all othe other agencies such as ACIAR, AIMS, ANSTO, NMI, Geoscience Australia and NICTA while you're at it) so that they don't have to rely on patent licensing and commercial spinoffs.
(Disclaimer: I work for one of those agencies, though not the CSIRO.)
I find it interesting that people have concentrated on vaccines and missed the part on antivirals.
I see your ancedote and raise you a Cochrane review, which strongly suggests that neuraminidase inhibitors such as Tamiflu really don't do very much.
If you look back in the thread, you will discover that I was replying to someone who claimed that "software freedom doesn't include restrictions on naming". Once you get that piece of context, it should all make sense.
I tacitly assumed that it was common knowledge that Linux was trademarked for perfectly good reasons, and that everybody would pick up on this. I apologise for misjudging the company I keep.
Or to put it another way, next Debian release.
For emulating embedded hardware on Windows? This is clearly a new definition of the word "work" that I wasn't previously aware of.
Agreed, but you left out one crucial reason: If you use Boost today, this maximises your chances that your code won't need very much porting to work with the C++ standard library of tomorrow.
I'd like to agree here, but IME autoconf and Boost.Build don't work so nicely together.
That's correct. Boost has the most stringent code review practices of probably any open source project.
This seems like an anti-open-source thing to do, but it's critical considering what Boost has to do. It's partly that library of infrastructure that all serious C++ projects need before they start, and partly the place where additions to the standard library are born. Boost development is slow, but Boost code is bulletproof.
Deadpan humour. It is a difficult concept.
As you may have worked out, it makes for a good abbreviation. It makes people think that they enforce a fact, rather than a legal fiction.
Exactly. That's why "Linux" isn't trademarked.
For most extant species on the planet, we don't even know how many chromosomes they have, let alone having sequenced them. This will speed things up enormously.
Because when The Man came around with the intention of rounding up Japanese-American citizens in WW2, gun owners everywhere stopped it happening. Just like today they are preventing over-reaching border search, the rampant illegal search and seizure in the "war on drugs" and a host of other civil rights violations which might otherwise go on every day.
Be glad you have a right to bear arms. If you didn't, you might end up with a government that doesn't respect civil rights.
While Prof. Hollaar is completely wrong that the Curry-Howard isomorphism is "cosmetic", I don't think it's actually relevant to this case.
C-H shows (handwave handwave) that types are the same thing as theorems and programs are the same thing as proofs.
So consider a program that sorts integers. It takes a list of elements (int list in ML, or [Integer] in Haskell) and returns a list of elements (same). So the theorem that sort proves is, in Haskell-like notation:
[Integer] -> [Integer]
Any program that has this type signature serves as a proof of the theorem, including the identity function and the function which ignores its argument and returns the empty list.
So patenting software does not prevent you from proving certain theorems. At most, it would prevent you from using certain proof techniques. But that's a tautology.
The more crucial argument is what RedHat and the SFLC brought up: Software patents prevent the "little guys" from competing with the "big guys". The Internet is only as functional and innovative as it is because the "little guys" were allowed to write functional, innovative software. Lock them out, and the speed of innovation of the Internet slows down to a crawl.
This, of course, is on top of the undeniable point that any other conclusion would be flatly contradictory to every other ruling of the SCOTUS on this point.
I am not an expert in the field or otherwise well-informed about the subject matter at hand, but it seems to me the major differences here are that it's wireless and that it communicates with a glasses-mounted camera that would hopefully be less obvious to a casual observer than the Borg-like implants that have been used to provide limited sight to the blind in the past.
So how is this different from the same thing that everyone is working on? Including, I might add, a consortium which includes the group who invented the cochlear implant.