It's amazing how quickly you can cast off Perl 6 when there's not even an alpha version of the interpreter yet (Pugs doesn't count) and when even the specs are not set in stone yet.
You don't need a finished interpreter for a language to be able to see the language definition and know that the syntax is an ungodly mess.
I loves perl for banging out quick scripts for munging data. I loves perl for being able to do all sorts of crazy crap to text files in a one-liner. But I _will_not_ use perl for anything remotely complicated, because the syntax for doing anything more complicated than blasting some text through a regexp or dumping some data into a one-dimensional array is such an ungodly kludge that I might as well be coding in befunge.
I don't think it's even possible turn perl5 into a language that's well-adapted to serious application development. You could create a perl-inspired language for those tasks, but it wouldn't be perl, and that doesn't seem to be what perl6 is doing.
Maybe the reason the U.S. military has become so skilled at getting their asses handed to them by low-tech insurgent groups is because they still think the Wars of the Future will fought against the Soviet Union.
Re:If you buy something because of promised featur
on
TiVo User's Fears Explored
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· Score: 2, Insightful
With Tivo's basic business model, you buy the Tivo as a way to connect to the Tivo service, and then pay a monthly fee to use that service. Under this model, what Tivo is doing is probaply okay in the same way that a cell phone company would be within the rights to change the terms of the service for peope who pay month-to-month or who have prepaid wireless.
On the other hand, I have a lifetime subscription for my Tivo. My understanding of the arrangement is that I paid a flat fee for a certain type of service, so I should be able to keep that kind of service even if Tivo changes what it offers to new customers.
But the trump of this is, I signed a contract and license agreement. So I can't complain - I knew this was probably coming, anyway. I think a lot of Tivoers are overreacting - so far it hasn't affected my service much, either - all my shows are still there by the time I get around to watching them, though we'll see what happens after this vacation I'm going on tomorrow.
Regardless, I think that the issue shouldn't be raised with Tivo, it should be raised with the EFF, the FCC, and, failing them, Congress.
I can't speak for cable users, but personally I find there to be something that's just a little bit insane about laws limiting personal use for something that's been blasted out into the universe for anyone with a radio antenna to receive. I'm fine with laws limiting redistribution and piracy, but if they're allowed to encode it into photons and then shoot them through my skull, I should be able to at least record it and watch it at my leisure, even 15 years later.
MapQuest is okay, but I imagine people will gradually switch to Google Maps.
I doubt it'll take very long. Everyone I know has had an experience where MapQuest has given them incredibly bad driving directions. Examples from my experience include getting from Memphis (toward the east of Illinois) to Chicago (east edge of Illinois) via St. Louis (west edge of Illinois), and a trip from Galesburg, IL to Jacksonville, IL - about 100 miles straight south - by getting on the interstate and going straight north about 45 minutes and then making a large curve to the east and back.
I'm sure Google Maps directions aren't perfect either, but I haven't had any stinkers like those yet.
Besides, their maps are about 1,000,000,000 times easier to read and use, and combined with Google Local you can do a heck of a lot more with them.
Yah, I expected that, too, but most of the Game Boy owners I know are still more interested in the Game Boy Micro than they are in the DS. I know I am. The DS just doesn't seem like something you can readily whip out on the bus.
On top of that, wiring the entire room up to the UPS would result in a crazy waste of the UPS's power.
If the power suddenly goes out, do you really want the lights in the room simultaneously drawing extra power from the UPS and hiding from you a pretty good clue that the power just went out?
This is surely not the way a UPS meant to be used. I've certainly never seen one hooked up this way.
how could you use an analogy like "it took millenia to get from iron->steel->a few dm steel wire for bridges" when it took millenia to get from horse and carriage to the car...but then only a half-century to get into space?
How could you use an analogy based on two examples of terrestrial, wheel-based transportation techniques followed by a sudden jump to a completely different line of technology based on different propulsion along with a whole host of other unrelated technological hurdles (all of which have been things folks were working on long before the invention of the automobile, I might add) and seriously think it means anything at all?
please formulate a similar chart to the aforementioned.
What chart? All you've formulated is a large pile of non-cohesive anecdote that doesn't really argue anything.
your the kind of physicist who looks through microscopes not telescopes, aren't you?
Actually, I'd rather have a scientist who looks through microscopes talking about spinning carbon nanotubes into something like the cable of a space elevator, what with all those details with spinning microscopic molecules, crystalline structure, point weaknesses, etc. You can look at all the stars you want, but that isn't going to produce thousands of miles of spun carbon nanotubes or other future material.
With so many languages, I'm not sure there's any one solution that can handle all of them. And if you want good, readable documentation, you're going to have to be describing all of the functions, objects, constants, etc. in human-written prose anyway.
Why not cut down on the workload for you by setting up a documentation wiki and asking the development team to help?
Quite honestly, I'd love for Apple to still have a non-photo, black-and-white screened iPod. Mine is starting to age, and I've finally acquired enough music that it won't all fit on the thing at once. I'd much rather not spend the extra $50 (or $100, whatever) for the color screen and photos. I don't need colors to be able to read the name of a song, and I don't think I'll be looking at photos while I'm driving, walking down the street, reading in the park, whatever.
All I want is a nice simple device that Just Plays Music, and Does It Well(tm).
I live in the US, so I'm guessing the answer is "yes and no."
More specifically, "Yes if you are the kind of entity that can afford a million dollar lobbyist budget, and no if you've never seen a million dollars all in one place."
Agreed. Doesn't installing this software without my knowledge qualify as some sort of computer crime? If I installed software on one of Sony's computers without asking them first, you can be sure my ass would be in jail on computer hacking charges faster than you could blink.
My guess would be that it would have to be straight H20 if the idea is to prevent detonation. Throwing extra H2 and 02 into the cylinder seems like it would have the opposite effect.
C++ was also built up over time with a continuous chain of "welcome additions." And then the language collapsed under its own weight.
Isn't the whole point of the.NET environment that it suddenly becomes trivial to get modules written in two different languages to work together? If so, then why isn't it being leveraged by, say, using Microsoft's Scheme.NET (or whatever they call it) for areas where functional makes sense, using C# in areas where imperative makes sense, etc. etc.
Makes me wonder why they bothered developing the CLR and much of the rest of the.NET technology at all if all they ever really planned on doing was bloating up C# and forgetting about all those (what we might now recognize as) cute product demo toys they rolled out in the beginning.
Hmm. I've noticed that "sciences enjoy humanities, humanities couldn't care less about sciences" thing, too. It bothers me, but I tend to ignore it, because it actually bothers me more when some humanities folks try to talk about the sciences. It's really hard to sit through a literature professor explaining to the class how science shows us that souls must exist due to the law of conservation of energy.
Methinks the problem is that, in large part, the things that go on in the humanities, aside from some large words and jargon, are at least somewhat accessible at any level. I can pick up an article from a history review and it makes perfect sense. To understand the sciences, though, there's a lot of back knowledge that you just can't get unless you actually study the sciences enough to keep track of, say, what a hadron or a eukaryote is.
Also, whatever happened to being well-rounded intelligent beings? Since when did high school become the place you go to learn a trade?
That actually happened about the time when high school was created. The masters of determining cirriculum were standing in the balance - they could create a model of school that encourages kids to think critically, and to focus on the process of thought and reasoning.
Or they could take the "student as shoe, randomly-assembled array of facts and figures as foot, us as shoehorn" approach and force a bunch of crap into kids brains on the swallow-and-regurgitate model. As a kicker, they could make the model one that would encourage independent acts of swallow-and-regurgitate by rewarding it with good grades for minimal mental flip-flops. And they could put a cherry on top by discouraging independent thought by making critical thinkers who try to form their own opinions have to defend their work much more vigorously in order to get good marks (i.e., making "not what the teacher thinks" a synonym for "incorrect").
Guess which one I think models our primary education system?
(And no, I don't blame teachers. The problem is completely systemic, and I see the teachers I've gotten to know as victims of this brain-crushing system, too.)
Not that there's anything particularly mentally challenging in forcing people to rote-memorize a set of equations and other numbers.
Math classes should be about teaching people how to do and understand things, not just bludgeoning students with a bunch of facts and formulas that everyone knows they'll forget precisely fifteen minutes after the final exam lands on your desk.
Yeah, they'll need to re-learn it if they get jobs that require trig (which aren't exactly all that common). My money's on them doing it by getting a sheet of paper that lists all the trig identities and using that, not by repeating the waste of time that is spending their evenings playing with flashcards.
It's like there was this subject, and nobody knew whether to roll it up into algebra or into calculus, so they decided to make it a separate class. Then they were faced with the problem of figuring out how to make a few weeks' worth of course material fill up an entire semester, so they filled it with busywork.
(not that uninformed is bad - perceptions of people who own neither system are what will ultimately decide which becomes dominant.)
Now, here's what I see as the difference between the DS and the PSP:
1. The PSP costs twice as much. 2. The PSP won't fit in my pocket as easily. 3. The PSP's battery life is so short that it's not really all _that_ portable. For example, it probably won't be able to keep me entertained for the length of a long flight. 4. With the PSP, I'm paying for oodles and oodles of features that I know I will not use. 5. I can play all those Game Boy games that are still on heavy rotation on the DS. 6. The PSP costs twice as much.
Quite honestly, it's the fact that we aren't quite sure that scares me the most.
Maybe everything will be hunky-dory in 100 years and there was no need to worry. But the cost of making that assumption and being wrong is so ridiculously high compsared to the cost of assuming the worst and taking massive preventative steps, that as far as I can tell, the only sane reaction to this issue is to err on the side of extreme caution.
The whole @$#@%^ planet is something we should not be playign cavalier with.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how quickly you can cast off Perl 6 when there's not even an alpha version of the interpreter yet (Pugs doesn't count) and when even the specs are not set in stone yet.
You don't need a finished interpreter for a language to be able to see the language definition and know that the syntax is an ungodly mess.
I loves perl for banging out quick scripts for munging data. I loves perl for being able to do all sorts of crazy crap to text files in a one-liner. But I _will_not_ use perl for anything remotely complicated, because the syntax for doing anything more complicated than blasting some text through a regexp or dumping some data into a one-dimensional array is such an ungodly kludge that I might as well be coding in befunge.
I don't think it's even possible turn perl5 into a language that's well-adapted to serious application development. You could create a perl-inspired language for those tasks, but it wouldn't be perl, and that doesn't seem to be what perl6 is doing.
If the encryption software in my web browser is a weapon, this satellite is a weapon.
Poor, confused America.
Maybe the reason the U.S. military has become so skilled at getting their asses handed to them by low-tech insurgent groups is because they still think the Wars of the Future will fought against the Soviet Union.
With Tivo's basic business model, you buy the Tivo as a way to connect to the Tivo service, and then pay a monthly fee to use that service. Under this model, what Tivo is doing is probaply okay in the same way that a cell phone company would be within the rights to change the terms of the service for peope who pay month-to-month or who have prepaid wireless.
On the other hand, I have a lifetime subscription for my Tivo. My understanding of the arrangement is that I paid a flat fee for a certain type of service, so I should be able to keep that kind of service even if Tivo changes what it offers to new customers.
But the trump of this is, I signed a contract and license agreement. So I can't complain - I knew this was probably coming, anyway. I think a lot of Tivoers are overreacting - so far it hasn't affected my service much, either - all my shows are still there by the time I get around to watching them, though we'll see what happens after this vacation I'm going on tomorrow.
Regardless, I think that the issue shouldn't be raised with Tivo, it should be raised with the EFF, the FCC, and, failing them, Congress.
I can't speak for cable users, but personally I find there to be something that's just a little bit insane about laws limiting personal use for something that's been blasted out into the universe for anyone with a radio antenna to receive. I'm fine with laws limiting redistribution and piracy, but if they're allowed to encode it into photons and then shoot them through my skull, I should be able to at least record it and watch it at my leisure, even 15 years later.
MapQuest is okay, but I imagine people will gradually switch to Google Maps.
I doubt it'll take very long. Everyone I know has had an experience where MapQuest has given them incredibly bad driving directions. Examples from my experience include getting from Memphis (toward the east of Illinois) to Chicago (east edge of Illinois) via St. Louis (west edge of Illinois), and a trip from Galesburg, IL to Jacksonville, IL - about 100 miles straight south - by getting on the interstate and going straight north about 45 minutes and then making a large curve to the east and back.
I'm sure Google Maps directions aren't perfect either, but I haven't had any stinkers like those yet.
Besides, their maps are about 1,000,000,000 times easier to read and use, and combined with Google Local you can do a heck of a lot more with them.
Yah, I expected that, too, but most of the Game Boy owners I know are still more interested in the Game Boy Micro than they are in the DS. I know I am. The DS just doesn't seem like something you can readily whip out on the bus.
On top of that, wiring the entire room up to the UPS would result in a crazy waste of the UPS's power.
If the power suddenly goes out, do you really want the lights in the room simultaneously drawing extra power from the UPS and hiding from you a pretty good clue that the power just went out?
This is surely not the way a UPS meant to be used. I've certainly never seen one hooked up this way.
you're a physicist?
One might ask the same about you. . .
how could you use an analogy like "it took millenia to get from iron->steel->a few dm steel wire for bridges" when it took millenia to get from horse and carriage to the car...but then only a half-century to get into space?
How could you use an analogy based on two examples of terrestrial, wheel-based transportation techniques followed by a sudden jump to a completely different line of technology based on different propulsion along with a whole host of other unrelated technological hurdles (all of which have been things folks were working on long before the invention of the automobile, I might add) and seriously think it means anything at all?
please formulate a similar chart to the aforementioned.
What chart? All you've formulated is a large pile of non-cohesive anecdote that doesn't really argue anything.
your the kind of physicist who looks through microscopes not telescopes, aren't you?
Actually, I'd rather have a scientist who looks through microscopes talking about spinning carbon nanotubes into something like the cable of a space elevator, what with all those details with spinning microscopic molecules, crystalline structure, point weaknesses, etc. You can look at all the stars you want, but that isn't going to produce thousands of miles of spun carbon nanotubes or other future material.
With so many languages, I'm not sure there's any one solution that can handle all of them. And if you want good, readable documentation, you're going to have to be describing all of the functions, objects, constants, etc. in human-written prose anyway.
Why not cut down on the workload for you by setting up a documentation wiki and asking the development team to help?
Exactly.
Quite honestly, I'd love for Apple to still have a non-photo, black-and-white screened iPod. Mine is starting to age, and I've finally acquired enough music that it won't all fit on the thing at once. I'd much rather not spend the extra $50 (or $100, whatever) for the color screen and photos. I don't need colors to be able to read the name of a song, and I don't think I'll be looking at photos while I'm driving, walking down the street, reading in the park, whatever.
All I want is a nice simple device that Just Plays Music, and Does It Well(tm).
Tried reading into it, but with the beginnings the words chopped off along the left side of the page, I just lost interest too quickly.
("Standard." Must be the world's first one-word oxymoron.)
Days hadn't been invented yet, now those --
Oh, nevermind.
I live in the US, so I'm guessing the answer is "yes and no."
More specifically, "Yes if you are the kind of entity that can afford a million dollar lobbyist budget, and no if you've never seen a million dollars all in one place."
Agreed. Doesn't installing this software without my knowledge qualify as some sort of computer crime? If I installed software on one of Sony's computers without asking them first, you can be sure my ass would be in jail on computer hacking charges faster than you could blink.
My guess would be that it would have to be straight H20 if the idea is to prevent detonation. Throwing extra H2 and 02 into the cylinder seems like it would have the opposite effect.
If your C# code ever becomes reasonably readable or maintainable, you can easily be replaced.
C++ was also built up over time with a continuous chain of "welcome additions." And then the language collapsed under its own weight.
.NET environment that it suddenly becomes trivial to get modules written in two different languages to work together? If so, then why isn't it being leveraged by, say, using Microsoft's Scheme.NET (or whatever they call it) for areas where functional makes sense, using C# in areas where imperative makes sense, etc. etc.
.NET technology at all if all they ever really planned on doing was bloating up C# and forgetting about all those (what we might now recognize as) cute product demo toys they rolled out in the beginning.
Isn't the whole point of the
Makes me wonder why they bothered developing the CLR and much of the rest of the
Hmm. I've noticed that "sciences enjoy humanities, humanities couldn't care less about sciences" thing, too. It bothers me, but I tend to ignore it, because it actually bothers me more when some humanities folks try to talk about the sciences. It's really hard to sit through a literature professor explaining to the class how science shows us that souls must exist due to the law of conservation of energy.
Methinks the problem is that, in large part, the things that go on in the humanities, aside from some large words and jargon, are at least somewhat accessible at any level. I can pick up an article from a history review and it makes perfect sense. To understand the sciences, though, there's a lot of back knowledge that you just can't get unless you actually study the sciences enough to keep track of, say, what a hadron or a eukaryote is.
Also, whatever happened to being well-rounded intelligent beings? Since when did high school become the place you go to learn a trade?
That actually happened about the time when high school was created. The masters of determining cirriculum were standing in the balance - they could create a model of school that encourages kids to think critically, and to focus on the process of thought and reasoning.
Or they could take the "student as shoe, randomly-assembled array of facts and figures as foot, us as shoehorn" approach and force a bunch of crap into kids brains on the swallow-and-regurgitate model. As a kicker, they could make the model one that would encourage independent acts of swallow-and-regurgitate by rewarding it with good grades for minimal mental flip-flops. And they could put a cherry on top by discouraging independent thought by making critical thinkers who try to form their own opinions have to defend their work much more vigorously in order to get good marks (i.e., making "not what the teacher thinks" a synonym for "incorrect").
Guess which one I think models our primary education system?
(And no, I don't blame teachers. The problem is completely systemic, and I see the teachers I've gotten to know as victims of this brain-crushing system, too.)
Not that there's anything particularly mentally challenging in forcing people to rote-memorize a set of equations and other numbers.
Math classes should be about teaching people how to do and understand things, not just bludgeoning students with a bunch of facts and formulas that everyone knows they'll forget precisely fifteen minutes after the final exam lands on your desk.
Yeah, they'll need to re-learn it if they get jobs that require trig (which aren't exactly all that common). My money's on them doing it by getting a sheet of paper that lists all the trig identities and using that, not by repeating the waste of time that is spending their evenings playing with flashcards.
It's like there was this subject, and nobody knew whether to roll it up into algebra or into calculus, so they decided to make it a separate class. Then they were faced with the problem of figuring out how to make a few weeks' worth of course material fill up an entire semester, so they filled it with busywork.
What did I miss?
You forgot the algebra.
(not that uninformed is bad - perceptions of people who own neither system are what will ultimately decide which becomes dominant.)
Now, here's what I see as the difference between the DS and the PSP:
1. The PSP costs twice as much.
2. The PSP won't fit in my pocket as easily.
3. The PSP's battery life is so short that it's not really all _that_ portable. For example, it probably won't be able to keep me entertained for the length of a long flight.
4. With the PSP, I'm paying for oodles and oodles of features that I know I will not use.
5. I can play all those Game Boy games that are still on heavy rotation on the DS.
6. The PSP costs twice as much.
Quite honestly, it's the fact that we aren't quite sure that scares me the most.
Maybe everything will be hunky-dory in 100 years and there was no need to worry. But the cost of making that assumption and being wrong is so ridiculously high compsared to the cost of assuming the worst and taking massive preventative steps, that as far as I can tell, the only sane reaction to this issue is to err on the side of extreme caution.
The whole @$#@%^ planet is something we should not be playign cavalier with.
GIMP on the Mac has gotten a whole lot better in the past three years. Check out the gimp.app project.