There's a bunch of good tutorials here. I learned everything I know about ocaml from there, in particular from Jason Hickey's, Richard Jones' and the OCaml manual. I spent a week learning that stuff and playing with it, and another week writing from scratch a rather non-trivial program that would have easily taken two months in C. I found ocaml astounding: nearly as fast as C, as compact and elegant as python (arguably more so, in fact).
Total rubbish. India was known as India long before. Hindustan was never a word used by the British. Columbus genuinely thought he had found India: that's why the Caribbean islands are known, even today, as the "west Indies". As others have pointed out, your "in dios" explanation is totally bogus, but it's typical of slashdot that you'll get a +5 informative for it.
The parent's post may have been moderated to Funny, but there is a bit of truth there.
There's a lot of truth but not in the way you say. India is already making money from satellite launches, undercutting the Europeans and Americans in cost. There could be a lot of money in manned space flight in the future.
Actually I found your post genuinely funny (and I'm from India). What I don't find funny is the incessant "why have a space program when you've got all those poor people" twerps.
Offtopic. Doesn't that phrase sound strange when you apply it to a person, yet sounds quite correct when applied to software?
Well, the Nov 2002 version of the software is the older version of the Nov 2003 software or the Nov 2004 software. They're 2 years, 1 year and 1 month old, respectively. It's like saying your elder sibling is an older version of you...
He seems to expect a brilliant, concise, epigrammatic piece of writing; most users want facts and don't care about the occasional clumsy sentence.
As for the facts, I've seen howlers in many mainstream encyclopedias. In the cases I know something about, I find wikipedia's standards quite good, and when there's an error I can at least go in there and correct it.
It's true I crosscheck anything I find there but I do that with other sources too. Never rely on a single source.
the concorde tragedies shouldn't be laughed about. They came about entirely because of breakdowns in communication (cheap workers from one country, documentation from another...) and could have easily been avoided.
What are you talking about? The concorde accident (there was only one) came about because of metal shrapnel on the runway, left by a previous plane, that punctured a tyre, pieces of which then ruptured a fuel tank.
What's in the FreeBSD base system isn't "straight up vi" (which is proprietary if I recall right), it's nvi.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 1
that they abolished it 140 years ago, leading to a civil war
Read more history before you babble. The Civil War was the cause, not the effect.
Lincoln's election on an abolitionist platform was the cause of the civil war -- in other words, the effect of his election was the secession of southern states, which led to the civil war; the emancipation proclamation came during the civil war; the effect of the union's victory was to make the writ apply in the south. Happy, pedant? Or can it be you haven't read that much history yourself (of your own country), only been spoonfed catchy soundbytes?
Lincoln's, of course, was a different Republican party, not the post-1960s perversion.
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 1
Excuse me, but slavery is still practiced in many spots on this globe.
Oh, how nice, now Americans can compare themselves to the "many spots on this globe" (like where?) and feel superior that they abolished it 140 years ago, leading to a civil war. (Sounds very much like Americans justifying their atrocities in Iraq saying "look what Saddam did.") Never mind that America's neighbours Canada and Mexico abolished it in 1834 and 1814 respectively, Britain in 1807, France in 1848 (earlier in 1794, but Napoleon re-established it a few years), and many countries never thought it acceptable at all (source:wikipedia)
Re:How did they decide?
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 2, Informative
So this leaves lots unsaid. Basically, if correspondents say they don't have press freedom, they don't. Doesn't seem like a very scientific study to me.
Maybe that's why India is ranked 120. Frankly, very little of India's press or media is government-owned, and I see savage criticism of the government every day, it's a nice change from the servile bootlicking of Bush that goes on in the US press.
Indians do tend to be very self-critical. Also there was one notorious case of an expose of government corruption that resulted in persecution of the journalists involved on legal grounds. That was ugly, and would, I'd agree, justify a somewhat low ranking... but then, a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, presently faces jail for hiding her sources, and it is well known that unfriendly journalists in the US are excluded from White House briefings, which is why even top papers like the Washington Post and the NYT tend to be so unquestioning of the government. That's simply not the case in India. In my book, India should rate far higher than the US...
Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Speak for yourself... I never cringe when I hear "... land of the free..."... neither do my Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, Protestant and atheist classmates
Have you asked any afro-americans and native americans?
America has been, somewhat, the land of the free since the 1960s and the civil rights movement (and the current republican party originated as a protest against that, pandering to the white south -- a strategy originating from Nixon -- and is doing its best to undo all those gains.)
Before the 1960s, America was marginally better than South Africa, that's all. And in the 19th century, it was guilty of genocide of many native American tribes, and was the last major country to abolish slavery, by many decades (and it still took a civil war to do that).
Land of the free -- yes, if you're a white anglo-saxon protestant.
There is a very good reason the big international cellphone companies (Vodafone, Orange, etc) find it hard going in the US. The rest of the world mostly uses GSM; the US uses CDMA. A GSM company can't just acquire a US company and get going: the infrastructure is all wrong. (Actually, T-Mobile and, I think, Cingular use GSM even in the US, so this may eventually change.)
Also, in the rest of the world, SMS and other value-added services are big (and big money-spinners). For some reason the US market seems resistant to that: people use their mobile phones for talking and for nothing else; even SMS is almost unheard of. That may give international companies some pause if they're thinking of making a push into the US...
There is an easier and better way. Quantum mechanical states are points in Hilbert space. All of quantum mechanics can be reduced to mathematics in Hilbert space, eliminating the need for wavefunctions.
Quantum mechanical states are vectors in a Hilbert space. And it's still a complex space (ie, over a complex scalar field). A wavefunction is a representation of a vector in the Hilbert space, using a coordinate basis. If two wavefunctions are out of phase by pi/2 (ie, a factor of i) in the coordinate basis, they are in your abstract Hilbert space, too.
Make those effects more obvious and make all the other laws of physics that weird and perhaps you'd get a universe whose inhabitants think of "2 + 2 = 4" as just a neat theoretical abstraction.
Nope. In that universe, if they added two apples to two apples, they'd still get four apples. Velocities may not be additive but other things would be. Even in our universe: it's not really flat (Euclidean), and the earth isn't flat either, but both are flat at small scales: you won't think about the curvature of the earth while building your house. So idealisation can still be useful (and of course, if you want to deal with curvature and relativity, mathematics can help you out there too).
Because Debian gives you a choice of "unstable" and "outdated software"? (I use "unstable" quite happily but I can see it would make some people nervous. There's a market for a stable but cutting-edge distribution.) Because "contributing to Debian" means a long, painful "democratic" voting process? Because Debian has a sucky installer and suckier system-management tools?
Have you used Ubuntu or any of the other Debian clones? You'd know the difference.
i is the square root of -1, which is about as abstract a concept as you'll ever come up with - it certainly doesn't correspond to any physical quantity (unless you define a physical system using complex coordinates for the sake of convenience).
Quantum mechanical wavefunctions are complex. You could define them as two real wavefunctions and work out the appropriate algebra, but it's exactly complex algebra. So i could correspond to the phase difference of two wavefunctions, which would be observable via interference effects.
Not disagreeing with what you're saying though -- the equation is fundamental mathematics, independent of the physical universe, it doesn't make sense to imagine an "alternative universe" where it doesn't apply.
CDs leave out frequencies above 22 kHz or so, which we can't hear, anyway. Or if those frequencies weren't filtered out while mastering, they may be aliased to lower frequencies, but (a) that's a problem with the mastering not the system, (b) it's still probably only a problem above 15 kHz or so, where we hear very little.
The bigger issue with CDs is their discretisation of the sound: 16 bits = +/- 32768 levels for amplitude, but most recordings don't explore the top end of that, which means feeble sounds could be very discretised. Modern circuitry does a very good job of smoothing it out though. I doubt, for normal (especially acoustic) music, anyone can really hear the difference between a CD played on a high-end system, and an SACD or something played on the same system (2-channel output, no surround). They only think they can. There was a time when many audiophiles seriously believed painting the non-playing side of a CD with green paint improved the sound, and such nonsense.
MP3s are a different matter. Anyone can tell a low-bitrate MP3. Even at 128 kbps, MP3s sound a bit hurtful to my ears. At 192 I'm not sure but it's possible I could still tell a difference; but at 256 I doubt I could. (with ogg I certainly can't.) And that's still less than half the size of a FLAC, so FLAC doesn't have any benefits for me. It amuses me to read the rants on etree.org on not "polluting" their pristine music with MP3s, while most of what they trade aren't even soundboard recordings, but mic recordings that sound like crap anyway.
Well, honestly, while N and OBSD have their merits (as were mentioned)
No, both were flamed. He says NetBSD is not secure and has poor device driver support: he doesn't know what he's talking about. NetBSD is as secure as the other BSDs and a lot more secure than linux: check the records. And if it weren't for NetBSD, FreeBSD would have pathetic device driver support. (It also wouldn't have rcNG and other innovations).
Assuming your post is the original article and not a clever troll, I'd have to say the original article is a stupid troll.
[NetBSD] is not secure and device driver support is paltry at best
Excuse me? What's insecure about NetBSD? If you look at actual security records, in the past few years all the BSDs are pretty comparable. And as for device drivers, it is the original source of many device drivers in the other BSDs, and was the first free OS to get USB support (before even Linux).
[OpenBSD] runs on very few platforms
Actually, many more than FreeBSD, not so far from NetBSD and Linux: nothing to sneeze at.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, and I'm still using the GNU ``mail`` command.
/bin/mail ...
You mean the BSD mail command?
rpm -qif
Name : mailx...
License: BSD
Packager : Red Hat, Inc.
Not everything in the world is GNU...
There's a bunch of good tutorials here. I learned everything I know about ocaml from there, in particular from Jason Hickey's, Richard Jones' and the OCaml manual. I spent a week learning that stuff and playing with it, and another week writing from scratch a rather non-trivial program that would have easily taken two months in C. I found ocaml astounding: nearly as fast as C, as compact and elegant as python (arguably more so, in fact).
Total rubbish. India was known as India long before. Hindustan was never a word used by the British. Columbus genuinely thought he had found India: that's why the Caribbean islands are known, even today, as the "west Indies". As others have pointed out, your "in dios" explanation is totally bogus, but it's typical of slashdot that you'll get a +5 informative for it.
There's a lot of truth but not in the way you say. India is already making money from satellite launches, undercutting the Europeans and Americans in cost. There could be a lot of money in manned space flight in the future.
Actually I found your post genuinely funny (and I'm from India). What I don't find funny is the incessant "why have a space program when you've got all those poor people" twerps.
Well, the Nov 2002 version of the software is the older version of the Nov 2003 software or the Nov 2004 software. They're 2 years, 1 year and 1 month old, respectively. It's like saying your elder sibling is an older version of you...
As for the facts, I've seen howlers in many mainstream encyclopedias. In the cases I know something about, I find wikipedia's standards quite good, and when there's an error I can at least go in there and correct it.
It's true I crosscheck anything I find there but I do that with other sources too. Never rely on a single source.
What are you talking about? The concorde accident (there was only one) came about because of metal shrapnel on the runway, left by a previous plane, that punctured a tyre, pieces of which then ruptured a fuel tank.
What's in the FreeBSD base system isn't "straight up vi" (which is proprietary if I recall right), it's nvi.
Read more history before you babble. The Civil War was the cause, not the effect.
Lincoln's election on an abolitionist platform was the cause of the civil war -- in other words, the effect of his election was the secession of southern states, which led to the civil war; the emancipation proclamation came during the civil war; the effect of the union's victory was to make the writ apply in the south. Happy, pedant? Or can it be you haven't read that much history yourself (of your own country), only been spoonfed catchy soundbytes?
Lincoln's, of course, was a different Republican party, not the post-1960s perversion.
Oh, how nice, now Americans can compare themselves to the "many spots on this globe" (like where?) and feel superior that they abolished it 140 years ago, leading to a civil war. (Sounds very much like Americans justifying their atrocities in Iraq saying "look what Saddam did.") Never mind that America's neighbours Canada and Mexico abolished it in 1834 and 1814 respectively, Britain in 1807, France in 1848 (earlier in 1794, but Napoleon re-established it a few years), and many countries never thought it acceptable at all (source:wikipedia)
Maybe that's why India is ranked 120. Frankly, very little of India's press or media is government-owned, and I see savage criticism of the government every day, it's a nice change from the servile bootlicking of Bush that goes on in the US press.
Indians do tend to be very self-critical. Also there was one notorious case of an expose of government corruption that resulted in persecution of the journalists involved on legal grounds. That was ugly, and would, I'd agree, justify a somewhat low ranking... but then, a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, presently faces jail for hiding her sources, and it is well known that unfriendly journalists in the US are excluded from White House briefings, which is why even top papers like the Washington Post and the NYT tend to be so unquestioning of the government. That's simply not the case in India. In my book, India should rate far higher than the US...
Have you asked any afro-americans and native americans?
America has been, somewhat, the land of the free since the 1960s and the civil rights movement (and the current republican party originated as a protest against that, pandering to the white south -- a strategy originating from Nixon -- and is doing its best to undo all those gains.)
Before the 1960s, America was marginally better than South Africa, that's all. And in the 19th century, it was guilty of genocide of many native American tribes, and was the last major country to abolish slavery, by many decades (and it still took a civil war to do that).
Land of the free -- yes, if you're a white anglo-saxon protestant.
Who, Quebec? French-speaking people? Fat chance
Also, in the rest of the world, SMS and other value-added services are big (and big money-spinners). For some reason the US market seems resistant to that: people use their mobile phones for talking and for nothing else; even SMS is almost unheard of. That may give international companies some pause if they're thinking of making a push into the US...
Quantum mechanical states are vectors in a Hilbert space. And it's still a complex space (ie, over a complex scalar field). A wavefunction is a representation of a vector in the Hilbert space, using a coordinate basis. If two wavefunctions are out of phase by pi/2 (ie, a factor of i) in the coordinate basis, they are in your abstract Hilbert space, too.
Nope. In that universe, if they added two apples to two apples, they'd still get four apples. Velocities may not be additive but other things would be. Even in our universe: it's not really flat (Euclidean), and the earth isn't flat either, but both are flat at small scales: you won't think about the curvature of the earth while building your house. So idealisation can still be useful (and of course, if you want to deal with curvature and relativity, mathematics can help you out there too).
Have you used Ubuntu or any of the other Debian clones? You'd know the difference.
Quantum mechanical wavefunctions are complex. You could define them as two real wavefunctions and work out the appropriate algebra, but it's exactly complex algebra. So i could correspond to the phase difference of two wavefunctions, which would be observable via interference effects.
Not disagreeing with what you're saying though -- the equation is fundamental mathematics, independent of the physical universe, it doesn't make sense to imagine an "alternative universe" where it doesn't apply.
Ok, ok. The first satellite launch by an indigenous vehicle was on July 18, 1980: still nearly 25 years ago, hardly news.
The bigger issue with CDs is their discretisation of the sound: 16 bits = +/- 32768 levels for amplitude, but most recordings don't explore the top end of that, which means feeble sounds could be very discretised. Modern circuitry does a very good job of smoothing it out though. I doubt, for normal (especially acoustic) music, anyone can really hear the difference between a CD played on a high-end system, and an SACD or something played on the same system (2-channel output, no surround). They only think they can. There was a time when many audiophiles seriously believed painting the non-playing side of a CD with green paint improved the sound, and such nonsense.
MP3s are a different matter. Anyone can tell a low-bitrate MP3. Even at 128 kbps, MP3s sound a bit hurtful to my ears. At 192 I'm not sure but it's possible I could still tell a difference; but at 256 I doubt I could. (with ogg I certainly can't.) And that's still less than half the size of a FLAC, so FLAC doesn't have any benefits for me. It amuses me to read the rants on etree.org on not "polluting" their pristine music with MP3s, while most of what they trade aren't even soundboard recordings, but mic recordings that sound like crap anyway.
Seriously, who else actually needs a camera phone? As if cellphones weren't already sufficiently annoying.
One of my favourite albums is Friday night in San Francisco. Acoustic guitar trio. John, Paco et Al.
No, both were flamed. He says NetBSD is not secure and has poor device driver support: he doesn't know what he's talking about. NetBSD is as secure as the other BSDs and a lot more secure than linux: check the records. And if it weren't for NetBSD, FreeBSD would have pathetic device driver support. (It also wouldn't have rcNG and other innovations).
[NetBSD] is not secure and device driver support is paltry at best
Excuse me? What's insecure about NetBSD? If you look at actual security records, in the past few years all the BSDs are pretty comparable. And as for device drivers, it is the original source of many device drivers in the other BSDs, and was the first free OS to get USB support (before even Linux).
[OpenBSD] runs on very few platforms
Actually, many more than FreeBSD, not so far from NetBSD and Linux: nothing to sneeze at.
And of course, he omitted DragonFly.