That was true when the Sempron first launched, but last summer they added 64-bit-enabled Semprons to the lineup (I think to counter 64-bit-enabled Celerons). The Semprons with 64-bit capability enabled are generally marketed with "64" in the product title, like this.
Check out Damn Small Linux, just one of the many "minimal Linux" distros out there. Less than 50MB, includes (from their site):
XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word-processor (FLwriter), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox window manager, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, some wireless support.
Too bad no emacs... that probably would've tripled the size;)
Hmmm, I read that as the designers wanting to tinker with the OS themselves (i.e. modify it to suit its unique hardware features/limitations and usage scenarios), not the designers thinking users would tinker with it. If nothing else, the fact that the OS, applications, and data all need to fit within 1GB of storage (and only 128MB of RAM)... if you trimmed that much fat from OS X I'm not sure how it would be any better/different than Linux.
Because Linux is designed by tinkerers for tinkerers, it will never be a general use computer by the unwashed, non-technical masses.
It's not clear to me that this is intended to be the kind of "general use" computer we are used to. Maybe it will only really be designed to run the productivity suite it comes with, along with some simple games... like GEM, back in the 80's. And if the exposed surface area is small enough, there's no reason Linux can't be plenty friendly (ever tried TiVo?).
That is really interesting! Now the original Windows clipboard keys make sense as well (Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert, and Shift-Insert for Cut, Copy, Paste respectively).
Now, this bugs people who're used to writing functional code as little inline snippets all over the place, but the Pythonic way of doing this is no less powerful.
Not less powerful, just less usable. In fact, from what I've seen, the Pythonic way is to not do it.
Take a look at how pervasively HOFs are used in any idiomatic Ruby API (or those of all the languages that came before it). There is a qualitative difference between closures with anonymous functions, and closures only via first class functions. "No less powerful" is true but irrelevant when it comes to having HOF available as an abstraction mechanism for your own code.
In other words, software companies don't deserve to make a profit?
Re:Thanks for the career, PHP!!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Care to share your personal experience with Ruby? Had you used PHP or ASP or Perl beforehand? What was the learning curve like? How long before you were building complex web apps? What do you like about it so much?
When learning Ruby, there is only one idea that you will need to expend some effort getting your head around: blocks. Once you grok them, though, you will appreciate the power and elegance they give you. Using an API that takes blocks is nice. Being able to use blocks in your own APIs is even better.
In fact, Ruby fans wax rhapsodic about blocks so often that it irks a lot of Lisp and Smalltalk hackers who have had them for decades. It's not a new concept, just new to a lot of today's young programmers who grew up on C-like languages (myself included).
Other than blocks, I found Ruby's learning curve to be astonishingly short. In fact, I think it is a great first programming language. In the past I've done serious work in ColdFusion, Java, and C#, and dabbled in C/C+++, PHP, Python, Perl, Lisp, and Visual Basic. Other than blocks, I found Ruby to be the easiest to learn by far (and blocks are the best part).
The pickaxe book is the one you want. Also check out Ruby on Rails if you're primarily interested in webapps (I've only barely looked at it, but a lot of people seem to be ga-ga over it).
Note that the session storage module for mm does not guarantee that concurrent accesses to the same session are properly locked.
This should be read: "Do not use." Unsafe concurrent access is a great way to introduce critical bugs that are only found after the app is deployed to production servers. (Just ask any ColdFusion developer who has used sessions in CF 5.0 or earlier.)
I believe in Ruby, "def" only ever means "method". If you mean class, you say "class". There are no functions per se in Ruby. Those things that look like functions are actually methods on the Object class, and those things that look like function calls are method invocations on the implicit Object that your script executes in (much like JavaScript usually runs in the context of an implicit Window object).
Anyway, C++ and Java are also guilty of overloading keywords. How many places does C++ use "virtual", and in totally varying ways? And Java has "final" which means immutable for fields/variables but "not overridable" for classes.
P.S. to understand what the difference between a definition and a declaration is, some ppl need to study CS. Language designers should know better than to use def as a keyword.
Tell that to Guy Steele, Gerald Sussman, John McCarthy... I don't know what difference you're referring to, as I don't have a CS background, but those guys used "define" or some variant thereof. So if it's a mistake, it's not a rookie mistake.
Anyway, if I am guessing correctly about what the difference is, it may help to know that functions (or for Ruby, fake functions) can be defined and re-defined repeatedly in these languages. And at runtime, before a function definition is executed, that function is not defined. Very different than C/C++/Java, if that's what you're used to, where function declarations are a compile-time construct.
Check out Boo. It's really a phenomenal language, and much more mature and stable than the version number (0.5) would lead you to believe.
Groovy has been taking a lot of heat lately. Boo seems not to suffer from the management/community problems Groovy has. In fact, Boo is just plain more exciting; Groovy is just Ruby disguised in Java syntax, as far as I can tell, whereas Boo takes what's best about Ruby (heavy emphasis on closures/blocks), Python (indent-based scoping, first class functions), and C# (static typing, properties, annotations, "using", p/invoke,.NET native), and one-ups them with type inference. It really does provide the best of both static and dynamic typing; there is NO compromise here as far as I can tell.
As a bonus, the tool support is already very good. As with any self-respecting scripting language, it includes an interactive interpreter. (Boo scripts can be interpreted or compiled.) The Visual Studio.NET debugger already works with Boo, and if you write your Boo code in SharpDevelop (a free IDE for.NET platform) you can get code completion, syntax highlighting, code folding, etc. And since it's all statically typed, there is hope for IntelliJ-like refactoring tools, although I don't think any exist yet.
Bottom line, I think any Python, Ruby, or Groovy fan should take a long, hard look at Boo. You will find a whole lot to like.
Not only has this been available in Firefox for years, it's been in Internet Explorer since at least 4.0 days. Unfortunately there isn't any UI for it in the browser itself, but it all comes down to a simple registry key.
(There used to be a much better page for this that let you specify your own shortcut keys, and it would generate the.reg files dynamically, but I can't find it anymore.)
It's not complex compared to other natural languages, but it is unbelievably complex compared to the kinds of machine languages that are ordinarily parsed by computers. A comp sci grad student could probably write a perfect syntax checker for, say, Pascal in a few days. I am not an expert, but I bet a team of comp sci grad students could dedicate their entire careers to a syntax checker for the English language and not succeed.
I'd have put it down as yet another thing that'll pointlessly bloat applications in a year or two in order to satisfy the "Ooo look, pretty colours!" mob.
We prefer to be called "Mac users", thankyouverymuch.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, IE7 also has tabs and a little search box.
That was true when the Sempron first launched, but last summer they added 64-bit-enabled Semprons to the lineup (I think to counter 64-bit-enabled Celerons). The Semprons with 64-bit capability enabled are generally marketed with "64" in the product title, like this.
XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, links web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word-processor (FLwriter), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox window manager, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, some wireless support.
Too bad no emacs... that probably would've tripled the size ;)
Because Linux is designed by tinkerers for tinkerers, it will never be a general use computer by the unwashed, non-technical masses.
It's not clear to me that this is intended to be the kind of "general use" computer we are used to. Maybe it will only really be designed to run the productivity suite it comes with, along with some simple games... like GEM, back in the 80's. And if the exposed surface area is small enough, there's no reason Linux can't be plenty friendly (ever tried TiVo?).
It is liquid enough to be called cash on their balance sheet.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT
EBITDA: $17.51 billion
Net income: $12.25 billion
That is really interesting! Now the original Windows clipboard keys make sense as well (Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert, and Shift-Insert for Cut, Copy, Paste respectively).
They do use Java on the server side for gmail and most other non-hardcore-search things (according to my friend who works there).
Not less powerful, just less usable. In fact, from what I've seen, the Pythonic way is to not do it.
Take a look at how pervasively HOFs are used in any idiomatic Ruby API (or those of all the languages that came before it). There is a qualitative difference between closures with anonymous functions, and closures only via first class functions. "No less powerful" is true but irrelevant when it comes to having HOF available as an abstraction mechanism for your own code.
emacs
Best Buy?
More than they trust governmental bodies. (FBI, Congress, FTC) Poorly worded, but well supported by the article.
In other words, software companies don't deserve to make a profit?
When learning Ruby, there is only one idea that you will need to expend some effort getting your head around: blocks. Once you grok them, though, you will appreciate the power and elegance they give you. Using an API that takes blocks is nice. Being able to use blocks in your own APIs is even better.
In fact, Ruby fans wax rhapsodic about blocks so often that it irks a lot of Lisp and Smalltalk hackers who have had them for decades. It's not a new concept, just new to a lot of today's young programmers who grew up on C-like languages (myself included).
Other than blocks, I found Ruby's learning curve to be astonishingly short. In fact, I think it is a great first programming language. In the past I've done serious work in ColdFusion, Java, and C#, and dabbled in C/C+++, PHP, Python, Perl, Lisp, and Visual Basic. Other than blocks, I found Ruby to be the easiest to learn by far (and blocks are the best part).
The pickaxe book is the one you want. Also check out Ruby on Rails if you're primarily interested in webapps (I've only barely looked at it, but a lot of people seem to be ga-ga over it).
Charlie Korsmo is definitely a nerd, and he's got the MIT degree (in Physics, no less!) to prove it.
And that someday, Ruby will make you happy. But don't learn it until you don't need PHP anymore, because you will never want to use PHP again.
You joke, but it's been done.
This should be read: "Do not use." Unsafe concurrent access is a great way to introduce critical bugs that are only found after the app is deployed to production servers. (Just ask any ColdFusion developer who has used sessions in CF 5.0 or earlier.)
Anyway, C++ and Java are also guilty of overloading keywords. How many places does C++ use "virtual", and in totally varying ways? And Java has "final" which means immutable for fields/variables but "not overridable" for classes.
P.S. to understand what the difference between a definition and a declaration is, some ppl need to study CS. Language designers should know better than to use def as a keyword.
Tell that to Guy Steele, Gerald Sussman, John McCarthy... I don't know what difference you're referring to, as I don't have a CS background, but those guys used "define" or some variant thereof. So if it's a mistake, it's not a rookie mistake.
Anyway, if I am guessing correctly about what the difference is, it may help to know that functions (or for Ruby, fake functions) can be defined and re-defined repeatedly in these languages. And at runtime, before a function definition is executed, that function is not defined. Very different than C/C++/Java, if that's what you're used to, where function declarations are a compile-time construct.
"Shaq is rich; the white guy who signs his checks is WEALTHY." --Chris Rock
Take it easy. There is such a thing as probable cause.
Groovy has been taking a lot of heat lately. Boo seems not to suffer from the management/community problems Groovy has. In fact, Boo is just plain more exciting; Groovy is just Ruby disguised in Java syntax, as far as I can tell, whereas Boo takes what's best about Ruby (heavy emphasis on closures/blocks), Python (indent-based scoping, first class functions), and C# (static typing, properties, annotations, "using", p/invoke, .NET native), and one-ups them with type inference. It really does provide the best of both static and dynamic typing; there is NO compromise here as far as I can tell.
As a bonus, the tool support is already very good. As with any self-respecting scripting language, it includes an interactive interpreter. (Boo scripts can be interpreted or compiled.) The Visual Studio .NET debugger already works with Boo, and if you write your Boo code in SharpDevelop (a free IDE for .NET platform) you can get code completion, syntax highlighting, code folding, etc. And since it's all statically typed, there is hope for IntelliJ-like refactoring tools, although I don't think any exist yet.
Bottom line, I think any Python, Ruby, or Groovy fan should take a long, hard look at Boo. You will find a whole lot to like.
http://www.dwayne.org/Computer/Registry/RegHacks.h tml
(There used to be a much better page for this that let you specify your own shortcut keys, and it would generate the .reg files dynamically, but I can't find it anymore.)
It's not complex compared to other natural languages, but it is unbelievably complex compared to the kinds of machine languages that are ordinarily parsed by computers. A comp sci grad student could probably write a perfect syntax checker for, say, Pascal in a few days. I am not an expert, but I bet a team of comp sci grad students could dedicate their entire careers to a syntax checker for the English language and not succeed.
We prefer to be called "Mac users", thankyouverymuch.