For the record: for several hours this was top news on the front page of aftonbladet.se, the most visited Swedish news site, with the headline "Don't use Internet Explorer". Hopefully at least a few people followed their link to mozilla.org...
The CIA World Factbook is a work of the U.S. government and therefore in the public domain. So there's most likely no false information in inserted for that reason.
I can barely conceive of the energy required to raise the average temperature of a *planet* by a degree C.
The atmosphere's mass is 5 × 10^18 kg. Assuming it takes 1000 joules to raise the temperature of one kilogram of air by one kelvin, the the energy is 5 × 10^21 joules.
Energy released by Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated: 2 × 10^17 joules.
So, 25,000 Tsar Bombas, enough to fight a global nuclear war several times over.
My heat capacity calculations are probably off a bit. Feel free to correct me.
In fact, it might be worse, because random web pages that talk about things like "astronauts never walked on the moon", etc., aren't culled together and presented as fact the way that wiki presents all information.
Nonsense. First, the presentation of information has nothing to do with the editing model that brought it about. Second, if someone publishes a site that claims astronauts never walked on the moon, they won't put up a sign that says "this is a random web page with no credibility that presents crank views and spreads misinformation", it'll rather have a sign that says "this site tells the factual truth". Third, wikis are random web pages too. There is nothing to prevent anyone from putting up a wiki with that kind of crap, and it'd be just as bad as static webpages.
It's been shown repeatedly that there is little to no validation of real-world wiki information. I've read several stories (some here on/.) about people making totally bogus wiki entries that other people support.
No, anything like this has not been "shown repeatedly". I recall one story was about someone inserting obscure errors into a Wikipedia articles on obscure subjects, but that's it. This kind of measure is useless; all it shows is that it is possible for someone to deliberately insert errors that remain unnoticed, not that this happens to such an extent that it significantly affects the quality of the site's content. Try inserting errors into e.g. the George W. Bush article and people will likely notice immediately. There is a LOT of vandalism on Wikipedia, but most of it is caught within a few minutes, in worse cases within a day or two. Contrary to your claims, several studies have found Wikipedia's content to be of higher quality than encyclopedias (e.g. this, see also this page).
The squadron of editors and fact checkers is already there. They are not paid to do this work, but it is being done nevertheless.
Not poker, but there's a gem in Masters of Doom about John Carmack playing blackjack (note that I've cut some of the text):
[he wrote in his.plan file] "Playing blackjack is a test of personal discipline. It takes a small amount of skill to know the right plays and count the cards, but the hard part is making yourself consistantly behave like a robot, rather than succumbing to your 'gut instincts'".
[...]
His research proved successful, netting him twenty thousand dollars, which he donated to the Free Software Foundation
[...]
On the next trip, Carmack was approached by three men in dark suits who said, "We'd appreciate if you'd play any other game than blackjack."
The others at the table watched in disbelief. "Why are they doing this to you?" a woman asked.
"They think that I'm counting cards," Carmack said.
"They think you can remember all those different cards?"
"Yeah, Carmack replied, "something like that."
"Well, what do you do?"
"I'm a computer programmer," he said, as he was escorted out the door.
The general expectation was that it'd live up to its legacy. Doom was revolutionary in the way it upped the level of immersion in games (in addition to being damn fun). Lots of people remember their impressions of Doom and expected the same to happen again -- hard to live up to, especially as different people remember different things from Doom to be great.
All the standard methods with leading and trailing double underscores are those which provide functionality available through some other syntax (calling, iteration, constructing the object, etc). Think of len() as an operator, a syntactical interface for.__len__(), like + is the syntactical interface for.__add__(). These methods are only private in the sense that there is a more standard way to access them. If you want to call them directly, which is sometimes useful, you can do that.
How about continuations? How about two different kinds of exceptions (real exceptions, and catch/throw nonlocal flow control)?
Except for escape continuations, which Python support through exceptions, I really don't see the use. Maybe I don't "get it" because I've never made myself appreciate them through writing a program where they solve a problem. Feel free to enlighten me.
How about "open" classes that you can extend after they are declared?
Python supports this. Just create a class and add new methods to it as you go along, if you really need to.
Blocks are more useful, but basically just syntax as indeed you can do the same by passing lambdas or named functions.
1) why do I need to include 'self' as the first parameter of each method definition?
It's nicer for unbound methods, and makes calls to superclass methods clearer. This is also answered in the Python FAQ.
2) In Python people tend to prefer, for example, to find the length of an array by saying:
length( array ) instead of array.length (the latter being the way you would do it in Ruby). Of course Pythonistas are now screaming that you can also say: array.__length__ (or something similar) in Python as well.
See my previous post in this thread. I agree that this is something of a wart, but a minor one.
As for Ruby vs. Python, I don't think it's a big deal as they are similar in many ways. If you're comfortable with either language, there's probably no need to switch to the other. Myself, I don't think the higher level of consistency in Ruby's object system offers any practical advantage, and find Python's syntax much nicer. Haven't seen anything particularly interesting in Ruby that isn't also in Python.
Indeed, if I had discovered Ruby before Python, it's quite possible that I would've stuck to that instead.
You can also do len(Foo()) or len("bla"), and although I agree that the existence of this legacy function makes the language less consistent I fail to see how it makes it any less OO.
I mainly use Windows, without anti-virus software, and I've *never* had a problem either with viruses or spyware on my own box. This is basically because 1) I've never used Outlook 2) I switched browser to Opera (and later, Mozilla) before spyware became really common, and 3) I consult common sense before I download and run something from the WWW.
If Psyco isn't on the list of the initiatives you've checked out, I suggest you have a look at it. It speeds up most Python code by 50%-100%, and can improve performance more than tenfold in some cases (for example, tight loops that only do integer math or involve many function calls). And it's really easy to use, you just start it from inside your code (import psyco; psyco.profile()) and it automagically replaces the Python interpreter core in runtime!
As for the article topic, I'm really enthusiastic about Parrot and hope it'll provide some competition for Java. Java is OK, but has little to offer compared to Python (except for better run-time speed, though on the other hand it uses something like ten times more memory), and more generally, dynamic typing is far superior to static typing.
Both classical mechanics and general relativity are incomplete; they are approximations of the physical reality we observe, both excellent for some applications but useless for others.
Newton's classical mechanics is amazingly accurate when familiar scales and speeds are involved, but breaks down when large speeds are involved. Relativity fixes this; however, both theories break down at the subatomic scale, where we need quantum mechanics instead. (Unfortunately, though, quantum mechanics ONLY holds for the subatomic scale.)
You're right about Einstein "getting it right", however, since in addition to working out relativity he was one of those physicists who developed the quantum theory. On the other hand he never really accepted quantum mechanics...
Slashdot Mirror
On a related note, I've read that in the Halifax explosion, someone was thrown a few kilometers through the air, landed in a tree, and survived.
This was mentioned as an anecdote in a physics book I used two years ago. Does anyone have any further information on this event?
Wouldn't that mean zsnes is fast enough to be run on an x86 emulator?
I'd also like to see if we could slow down the Earth to create 30 hour days.
Yet another reason to build space elevators!
That won't work for indented blocks, however.
Fortunately, exec comes to the rescue!(using __ instead of regular spaces since Slashdot's comment molester deletes spaces)
Now any Python program can be expressed in one (long) line.
they're making a virtual machine that is better suited to running code from weakly-typed languages...
Wrong! They're making a virtual machine that is better suited to dynamically typed languages.
(Python is strongly typed.)
More efficiently:
Seems accurate if these are lines of Perl, and they are converting them to Java before sending...
For the record: for several hours this was top news on the front page of aftonbladet.se, the most visited Swedish news site, with the headline "Don't use Internet Explorer". Hopefully at least a few people followed their link to mozilla.org...
Certainly the game is there for entertainment, which makes it different from a documentary (for example)
Many documentaries are made for entertainment, too. On the other hand, research papers...
There's a finite quantity of it in this universe
How do you know the universe is finite?
The CIA World Factbook is a work of the U.S. government and therefore in the public domain. So there's most likely no false information in inserted for that reason.
I can barely conceive of the energy required to raise the average temperature of a *planet* by a degree C.
The atmosphere's mass is 5 × 10^18 kg. Assuming it takes 1000 joules to raise the temperature of one kilogram of air by one kelvin, the the energy is 5 × 10^21 joules.
Energy released by Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated: 2 × 10^17 joules.
So, 25,000 Tsar Bombas, enough to fight a global nuclear war several times over.
My heat capacity calculations are probably off a bit. Feel free to correct me.
In fact, it might be worse, because random web pages that talk about things like "astronauts never walked on the moon", etc., aren't culled together and presented as fact the way that wiki presents all information.
/.) about people making totally bogus wiki entries that other people support.
Nonsense. First, the presentation of information has nothing to do with the editing model that brought it about. Second, if someone publishes a site that claims astronauts never walked on the moon, they won't put up a sign that says "this is a random web page with no credibility that presents crank views and spreads misinformation", it'll rather have a sign that says "this site tells the factual truth". Third, wikis are random web pages too. There is nothing to prevent anyone from putting up a wiki with that kind of crap, and it'd be just as bad as static webpages.
It's been shown repeatedly that there is little to no validation of real-world wiki information. I've read several stories (some here on
No, anything like this has not been "shown repeatedly". I recall one story was about someone inserting obscure errors into a Wikipedia articles on obscure subjects, but that's it. This kind of measure is useless; all it shows is that it is possible for someone to deliberately insert errors that remain unnoticed, not that this happens to such an extent that it significantly affects the quality of the site's content. Try inserting errors into e.g. the George W. Bush article and people will likely notice immediately. There is a LOT of vandalism on Wikipedia, but most of it is caught within a few minutes, in worse cases within a day or two. Contrary to your claims, several studies have found Wikipedia's content to be of higher quality than encyclopedias (e.g. this, see also this page).
The squadron of editors and fact checkers is already there. They are not paid to do this work, but it is being done nevertheless.
Doom was a pretty horrific game back then.
The general expectation was that it'd live up to its legacy. Doom was revolutionary in the way it upped the level of immersion in games (in addition to being damn fun). Lots of people remember their impressions of Doom and expected the same to happen again -- hard to live up to, especially as different people remember different things from Doom to be great.
All the standard methods with leading and trailing double underscores are those which provide functionality available through some other syntax (calling, iteration, constructing the object, etc). Think of len() as an operator, a syntactical interface for .__len__(), like + is the syntactical interface for .__add__(). These methods are only private in the sense that there is a more standard way to access them. If you want to call them directly, which is sometimes useful, you can do that.
How about continuations? How about two different kinds of exceptions (real exceptions, and catch/throw nonlocal flow control)?
Except for escape continuations, which Python support through exceptions, I really don't see the use. Maybe I don't "get it" because I've never made myself appreciate them through writing a program where they solve a problem. Feel free to enlighten me.
How about "open" classes that you can extend after they are declared?
Python supports this. Just create a class and add new methods to it as you go along, if you really need to.
Blocks are more useful, but basically just syntax as indeed you can do the same by passing lambdas or named functions.
See my previous post in this thread. I agree that this is something of a wart, but a minor one.
As for Ruby vs. Python, I don't think it's a big deal as they are similar in many ways. If you're comfortable with either language, there's probably no need to switch to the other. Myself, I don't think the higher level of consistency in Ruby's object system offers any practical advantage, and find Python's syntax much nicer. Haven't seen anything particularly interesting in Ruby that isn't also in Python.
Indeed, if I had discovered Ruby before Python, it's quite possible that I would've stuck to that instead.
...a benchmark that actually measures real-world performance.
I mainly use Windows, without anti-virus software, and I've *never* had a problem either with viruses or spyware on my own box. This is basically because 1) I've never used Outlook 2) I switched browser to Opera (and later, Mozilla) before spyware became really common, and 3) I consult common sense before I download and run something from the WWW.
If Psyco isn't on the list of the initiatives you've checked out, I suggest you have a look at it. It speeds up most Python code by 50%-100%, and can improve performance more than tenfold in some cases (for example, tight loops that only do integer math or involve many function calls). And it's really easy to use, you just start it from inside your code (import psyco; psyco.profile()) and it automagically replaces the Python interpreter core in runtime!
As for the article topic, I'm really enthusiastic about Parrot and hope it'll provide some competition for Java. Java is OK, but has little to offer compared to Python (except for better run-time speed, though on the other hand it uses something like ten times more memory), and more generally, dynamic typing is far superior to static typing.
Both classical mechanics and general relativity are incomplete; they are approximations of the physical reality we observe, both excellent for some applications but useless for others.
Newton's classical mechanics is amazingly accurate when familiar scales and speeds are involved, but breaks down when large speeds are involved. Relativity fixes this; however, both theories break down at the subatomic scale, where we need quantum mechanics instead. (Unfortunately, though, quantum mechanics ONLY holds for the subatomic scale.)
You're right about Einstein "getting it right", however, since in addition to working out relativity he was one of those physicists who developed the quantum theory. On the other hand he never really accepted quantum mechanics...
Extreme left-wing? Wouldn't that be revolutionary communism? Moore is more accurately characterized as a social democrat.