Once you get over your white space phobia and brainwashing imposed by other languages and closed minded programmers, you'll actually learn to love python's white space scoping.
I used to be one of those brain-dead space haters, too. Now ever since I first saw the light, my language of choice has been WhiteSpace and I've never looked back.
Nope. *Maybe* a metal detector might be useful, but that will only find the iron-nickel meteorites. For the stony ones it would be useless.
As a matter of fact, metal detectors are used for finding stony meteorites as well. Apart from a few rare types, stony meteorites contain enough metal to be detected by a properly tuned metal detector. The trick, however, lies in choosing the right model for the meteorite type and terrain and tuning it properly. And you also have to know how to use it in order to fully utilize its potential (it's harder than it seems). This is absolutely non-obvious and you will have experienced meteorite hunters argue over which is best and everyone has their own set of favorite settings and tricks. In areas close to civilization, you will run into lots of metal garbage buried in the ground and it takes experience to filter out some signals right away and perseverance to dig and try other ones and fail many times before you find anything interesting. Deserts are much better as they have less junk but may host snakes and other unexpected stuff. Still, the rewards are... rewarding. A meteorite collector myself, best advice I can give you is to stick to someone who knows the topic well and learn from them. Look, ask questions, and try using the gear they suggest to you, as practical experience is crucial. Happy hunting!
Try explaining to a physicist how a 32 or 64 bit float can't exactly replicate all of the numbers they think it can and watch half of them have their eyes gloss over for half an hour.
I have studied both physics and CS and I can hardly imagine a physics curriculum (especially one in theoretical physics) which doesn't include any course in numerical methods.
Another thing is basic good practices, in particular those related to maintainability. My experience is that this area seems to be lacking and indeed I've seen some terrible practices, like a complex application compiled from a single FORTRAN file 1 MB in size (including comments). While FORTRAN still has its merits in many areas of computationally-intensive programming, it is a nightmare from the maintainability perspective, especially if misused as it sometimes is.
And if your decision requires more than a yes/no answer? Do you use a 64-sided die and assign a choice to each side, and then memorize those assignments?
That wolud be an overcomplication. I simply toss 6 times to generate the 6 random bits neccessary for my 64=2^6 choices.
2. Next, ask them for their slashdot uid, and look at some of their posts, and their friends/foes. You'll get a good idea as to what others in the community think of them. No friends? Guess they had nothing to say. No foes? Shies from controversy or doesn't have strong opinions. No journal entries? Possible indicator that they're not much into sharing experiences, knowledge, etc.
Or perhaps they've got a life and better things to do than engage in discussions on Slashdot?
>What's also rarer is that OUR moon has a face on it. I don't see any other planets having moons with faces on them. So all these other loser planets just gotta admit that our moon is better than their moon.
Why not just look here?
when talking about the weather, the units are TOO big. The difference between 12C and 13C is too great.
First of all, one degree Fahrenheit is 5/9 of one degree Celsius - the difference is not an order of magnitude. You can use Celsius with a precision of 0.5 degrees and you get about the same precision as with integer Fahrenheit. Then again, in everyday life we can seldom measure temperatures with acuuracy much higher than 1 degree Celsius. Temperature is tricky to measure and actual precision is usually much lower than you might suspect. Actually, even the defining points of the ITS are often only defined with a precision of 0.001 Kelvin. Everyday measurments rarely exceed a real precision of 0.1 K and for air temperature, 1 K is probably the maximal reasonable precision. Yes, you can measure the tempareture of air in some place with higher precision, but is the result really meaningful? A slight difference in the amount of reflected sunlight or random fluctuations caused by the movement of air can cause the temperature to change by more than one degree in an unpredictable way in a very short time.
Rule #1. NEVER USE BASIC TYPES
Please use "Int" instead of "int"... A good JVM will run this code nearly as fast, but the added bonus is that you make your code way more generic. Java is not C++.
On the other hand, Java is not SmallTalk. Primitive types are there for a good reason and you can and should use them to your advantage where it makes sense. BTW, it's Integer, not Int.
It's likely that Mozilla should ideally rewrite a vast portion of their code, keeping simplicity in mind. That likely won't happen, and thus we will most assuredly still run into problems with Firefox and Gecko, problems caused directly by the overcomplication of the Mozilla architecture.
Netscape, the forefather of Mozilla, decided to rewrite their Navigator from scratch when they went from version 4 to 6. The result was a terribly bloated program which was barely usable on usual hardware of the day and caused Netscape to lose almost all of its power. I hope Mozilla doesn't try to repeat this step.
If I recall correctly, UTF-8 was invented by the people who created Plan 9. I think that's a great example of a smart idea, too - get Unicode support while staying ASCII-compatible. Without UTF-8, most of the standard UNIX tools would need some dramatic changes in order to be able to handle Unicode. With UTF-8, they worked right aways if you didn't care about characters vs bytes, and handled characters vs bytes correctly after just a few changes (most of them in locale data and not the programs themselves, probably).
That still means running OpenGL will be so much of a hassle that people will actually be forced into using DirectX. If you can use it, but it disables most of the visible cool stuff plus it's an old version which only supports a subset of current capabilities, it could as well not be there at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you get over your white space phobia and brainwashing imposed by other languages and closed minded programmers, you'll actually learn to love python's white space scoping.
I used to be one of those brain-dead space haters, too. Now ever since I first saw the light, my language of choice has been WhiteSpace and I've never looked back.
Nope. *Maybe* a metal detector might be useful, but that will only find the iron-nickel meteorites. For the stony ones it would be useless.
As a matter of fact, metal detectors are used for finding stony meteorites as well. Apart from a few rare types, stony meteorites contain enough metal to be detected by a properly tuned metal detector. The trick, however, lies in choosing the right model for the meteorite type and terrain and tuning it properly. And you also have to know how to use it in order to fully utilize its potential (it's harder than it seems). This is absolutely non-obvious and you will have experienced meteorite hunters argue over which is best and everyone has their own set of favorite settings and tricks. In areas close to civilization, you will run into lots of metal garbage buried in the ground and it takes experience to filter out some signals right away and perseverance to dig and try other ones and fail many times before you find anything interesting. Deserts are much better as they have less junk but may host snakes and other unexpected stuff. Still, the rewards are... rewarding. A meteorite collector myself, best advice I can give you is to stick to someone who knows the topic well and learn from them. Look, ask questions, and try using the gear they suggest to you, as practical experience is crucial. Happy hunting!
Michal
This comparison may (or may not) give interesting insights into the rise of influence of the US (or at least American vs British English).
Best applied to the Fibonacci sequence
Try explaining to a physicist how a 32 or 64 bit float can't exactly replicate all of the numbers they think it can and watch half of them have their eyes gloss over for half an hour.
I have studied both physics and CS and I can hardly imagine a physics curriculum (especially one in theoretical physics) which doesn't include any course in numerical methods.
Another thing is basic good practices, in particular those related to maintainability. My experience is that this area seems to be lacking and indeed I've seen some terrible practices, like a complex application compiled from a single FORTRAN file 1 MB in size (including comments). While FORTRAN still has its merits in many areas of computationally-intensive programming, it is a nightmare from the maintainability perspective, especially if misused as it sometimes is.
Actually programming in your head is for lazy developers. I didn't write anything, I only proved that my algorithm is correct.
Where is badanalogyguy when you need him?
LaTeX is like democracy. In its domain, it's the worst system on Earth, only no one has been able to come up with anything better so far.
And if your decision requires more than a yes/no answer? Do you use a 64-sided die and assign a choice to each side, and then memorize those assignments?
That wolud be an overcomplication. I simply toss 6 times to generate the 6 random bits neccessary for my 64=2^6 choices.
Why the hell would you model an asteroid with some improbable shape like a cube?
They must have been inspired by the last level of Doom II.
Suggested tag: flamebait
Suggested tag: sarcasm
Fixed
2. Next, ask them for their slashdot uid, and look at some of their posts, and their friends/foes. You'll get a good idea as to what others in the community think of them. No friends? Guess they had nothing to say. No foes? Shies from controversy or doesn't have strong opinions. No journal entries? Possible indicator that they're not much into sharing experiences, knowledge, etc.
Or perhaps they've got a life and better things to do than engage in discussions on Slashdot?
>What's also rarer is that OUR moon has a face on it. I don't see any other planets having moons with faces on them. So all these other loser planets just gotta admit that our moon is better than their moon.
Why not just look here?
There is no SWARM.
And when I saw SO_EXCITED I thought it was a new option for sockets.
Oh, wait...
Actually, this candidate seems even better. Those whose vote for him will get the bonus of suffering a little less before they are eaten.
> ...violating, the rules, of grammar;
one
at
a time
First of all, one degree Fahrenheit is 5/9 of one degree Celsius - the difference is not an order of magnitude. You can use Celsius with a precision of 0.5 degrees and you get about the same precision as with integer Fahrenheit. Then again, in everyday life we can seldom measure temperatures with acuuracy much higher than 1 degree Celsius. Temperature is tricky to measure and actual precision is usually much lower than you might suspect. Actually, even the defining points of the ITS are often only defined with a precision of 0.001 Kelvin. Everyday measurments rarely exceed a real precision of 0.1 K and for air temperature, 1 K is probably the maximal reasonable precision. Yes, you can measure the tempareture of air in some place with higher precision, but is the result really meaningful? A slight difference in the amount of reflected sunlight or random fluctuations caused by the movement of air can cause the temperature to change by more than one degree in an unpredictable way in a very short time.
It's likely that Mozilla should ideally rewrite a vast portion of their code, keeping simplicity in mind. That likely won't happen, and thus we will most assuredly still run into problems with Firefox and Gecko, problems caused directly by the overcomplication of the Mozilla architecture.
Netscape, the forefather of Mozilla, decided to rewrite their Navigator from scratch when they went from version 4 to 6. The result was a terribly bloated program which was barely usable on usual hardware of the day and caused Netscape to lose almost all of its power. I hope Mozilla doesn't try to repeat this step.
Not really. Ogg Vorbis on the other hand probably is.
My preferred one is "How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the tough lectures involving quantum mechanics."
Better yet:5 105820974944592307\0 664709384460955058\6 229489549303819644\5 648566923460348610\7 488152092096282925\9 519415116094330572\2 379962749567351885\2 139494639522473719\6 694051320005681271\1 224953430146549585\1 815981362977477130\3 185950244594553469\8 752886587533208381\8 235378759375195778\8
bc -l
scale=1000
4*a(1)
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937
8164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823
2231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644
2881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914
4543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881
4091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146
7036575959195309218611738193261179310511854807446
7527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860
0702179860943702770539217176293176752384674818467
4526356082778577134275778960917363717872146844090
3710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640344
9960518707211349999998372978049951059731732816096
0830264252230825334468503526193118817101000313783
4206171776691473035982534904287554687311595628638
1857780532171226806613001927876611195909216420198
If I recall correctly, UTF-8 was invented by the people who created Plan 9. I think that's a great example of a smart idea, too - get Unicode support while staying ASCII-compatible. Without UTF-8, most of the standard UNIX tools would need some dramatic changes in order to be able to handle Unicode. With UTF-8, they worked right aways if you didn't care about characters vs bytes, and handled characters vs bytes correctly after just a few changes (most of them in locale data and not the programs themselves, probably).
That still means running OpenGL will be so much of a hassle that people will actually be forced into using DirectX. If you can use it, but it disables most of the visible cool stuff plus it's an old version which only supports a subset of current capabilities, it could as well not be there at all.