To be honest: That Java code is *more* readable and understandable, as well as providing more pointers just exactly *what* the computer is supposed TO DO.
Interesting. I completely disagree with you. For me, the scheme code is completely readable, and tells me exactly what the computer is supposed to be doing.
I get that LISP is enjoyable. That you can feel all-powerful for spending enormous amount of hours carving out the code in detail, perfecting it. Everything fitting together neatly.
Again, my experience seems to be diametrally opposite to yours. In languages like Java, or even Python, which I actually like and use a lot, I always feel like I am spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to fit my ideas into the language syntax, and then going back and rewriting things because I find out they would better be written differently. Or not going back, but being dissatisfied with the code, promissing myself that one day I will go and rewrite it the "right" way. With Lisp, though, I usually just write code. The main problem with Lisp for me is that there just isn't such huge set of libraries as for example in Python, and things like plotting data or user interaction or even installing libraries and modules, and OS integration etc, is just hard. If Lisp had all the libraries and modules that I use in Python on daily basis, I would most likely completely switch to it.
That is unfortunately true. Our mathematical notation is a result of centuries of bad ideas, compromises between clarity and brevity, and just plain nonsense. It is one of the biggest hurdles kids have to overcome when learning algebra.
In order to properly understand things like expression evaluation, composition and transformation of functions, derivatives etc, one has to actually translate the horrible infix mess that we use to prefix notation in your head. One of the biggest problem students have when calculating derivatives, which should actually be a completely trivial task, is this translation.
Ebooks don't have this flaw, so there is no reason to discount them
There is a very good reason to discount ebooks: there is very little cost involved in selling additional copies. Lets say I print 1000 copies of a book and sell them $20 a piece, I have $20,000 revenue. To sell more than that, I have to print and ship more, which will significantly increase my cost, so I only do it if I have a good reason to believe they will still sell for a good price.
With ebooks, let's say I publish an ebook, sell it for $20 a piece, and sell 1000 of them during the first two weeks. Then, during the next two months, I sell 5. That means nobody is willing to pay $20 for my book anymore. But there could be another 1000 people willing to pay $10, giving me additional $10000 revenue, with only a little increase in cost. Then I can sell another 2000 of them for $5 a piece, and finally I let people name their own price and sell 1,000,000 for $1 each on average.
If you are talking about Scratch on the pi, that should work out of the box.
Finally, if you want to use the Lego motors and sensors with the pi, I am not aware of any existing project, but I know that they have been used with an arduino, so it should be possible to drive them from the pi. It would be more powerful and probably cheaper than the new NXT brick, although I suspect that most of the cost of the Lego kit is due to the motors and sensors, rather than the brick itself.
Interesting. None of the schools my kids go to teaches Word or Excel. They teach english, essay writing, composition, science, etc., It is assumed that they will turn in their work typed, with graphs and tables when appropriate. Nobody bothers teaching them how to do it, as far as I can tell, they mostly just figure it out themselves. And nobody cares what specific software they use.
Exactly. It says nothing about "modern" bloated desktop environments. I have an old desktop computer that I use as a print server, and it crawls with lxde or xfce, but it is perfectly usable with something like fvwm or fluxbox, and runs gnumeric and abiword perfectly fine, as well as most games that are available in linux. I don't know if it plays HD video, I never tried it. It has 512 MB, but memory is almost never a problem, usually about half of that is free anyway.
In the case you are refering to the Sarajevo assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the assassins were right wing serbian nationalists, being about as far from anarchists as the iranian president is. If you are refering to some other event, will you please enlighten me?
Besides, nobody said everything has to be right wing. I hate communists, and for a good reason, as I had plenty of direct (very unplesant) experience with them, but clearly in the cases discussed here, the people involved undoubtedly are or were right wing extremists.
By the way, do you realize that, according to your definition of conservative, in a communist regime, the communists are the conservatives?
Considering that artists were painting or drawing on vertical or nearly vertical surfaces for many centuries, maybe it was just a particularly bad design that made the pen hard to use.
The population size is actually irrelevant (provided it is large enough), at least for confidence intervals, which is what the sample size calculator does.
Indeed. I grew up under a communist dictatorship, and most of the thgings that the "copyright dictators" are trying to force down our throats would make communist censors and police drool with excitement.
5 minutes later: Ehm, sorry. Perhaps US drivers should get driving instructions, period. But no, that would probably infringe on some sort of civil liberty and endanger our freedom.
Clojure is pretty cool, and it compiles to the JVM code, but I have never heard about it being a replacement for JavaScript. In which sense would it replace JavaScript?
When I was working in aerospace, we would often write the manual first, then implement.
I remember back in 80's having to deal with a manual that was obviously written this way. It was the C api for the INFORMIX database system. The first third of the manual was basically the specification, each function was listed with its prototype, description etc. When I started reading it, it seems like an excellent, very powerful system. The problem was that the remaining two thirds of the manual were a list of errors. Few examples: Error 234: such and such function only works with integer arguments. Error 135: such and such function only works with strings that are no longer than 128 characters. There were hundreds of them, in no particular order. It seems that they first wrote the specification, then someone wrote a really shitty incomplete implementation, and then, during testing, every time they ran into a bug or a limitation, instead of fixing the bug or at least changing the specification to reflect the limitation, they made the code to generate an error message with a specific number, and they added a description of the error to the back of the manual. Needles to say, the whole thing was a freaking nightmare to use.
such as the impact on the quality of the resulting textbooks
Yes, we definitely should stop this insanity right now! There is a chance that the textbooks thus produced will be of low quality! The humankind would definitely not be able to survive that!
Actually, I think we will survive just fine, considering that we are currently surviving a huge ammount of incredibly shitty textbooks from our major publishers.
Couple years ago, we outsourced our bookstore to Barnes and Noble, because we simply could not afford running it any more. We kept sinking money into it semester after semester. Large booksellers are better equipped to handle the "sell large amount of textbooks at the beginning of each semester and then keep the remaining copies around in a storage, sending the ones that will not be needed next semester back to the publisher, buying book back from students at the end of the semester, and getting ready for the new semester" cycle.
As far as professors writing their own course materials, that fairly common. Typically, these are sold for the cost of printing and binding. I have never seen a professor actually getting any money for these. The main problem is that it takes time, and at our college, with our teaching load, service, and need to keep current in the field, there is very little time for writing these. I have been working on a textbook like that for one of my classes for several years, and I am nowhere near finishing.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest: That Java code is *more* readable and understandable, as well as providing more pointers just exactly *what* the computer is supposed TO DO.
Interesting. I completely disagree with you. For me, the scheme code is completely readable, and tells me exactly what the computer is supposed to be doing.
I get that LISP is enjoyable. That you can feel all-powerful for spending enormous amount of hours carving out the code in detail, perfecting it. Everything fitting together neatly.
Again, my experience seems to be diametrally opposite to yours. In languages like Java, or even Python, which I actually like and use a lot, I always feel like I am spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to fit my ideas into the language syntax, and then going back and rewriting things because I find out they would better be written differently. Or not going back, but being dissatisfied with the code, promissing myself that one day I will go and rewrite it the "right" way. With Lisp, though, I usually just write code. The main problem with Lisp for me is that there just isn't such huge set of libraries as for example in Python, and things like plotting data or user interaction or even installing libraries and modules, and OS integration etc, is just hard. If Lisp had all the libraries and modules that I use in Python on daily basis, I would most likely completely switch to it.
That is unfortunately true. Our mathematical notation is a result of centuries of bad ideas, compromises between clarity and brevity, and just plain nonsense. It is one of the biggest hurdles kids have to overcome when learning algebra.
In order to properly understand things like expression evaluation, composition and transformation of functions, derivatives etc, one has to actually translate the horrible infix mess that we use to prefix notation in your head. One of the biggest problem students have when calculating derivatives, which should actually be a completely trivial task, is this translation.
...dancing in a dioxin dump...
Ebooks don't have this flaw, so there is no reason to discount them
There is a very good reason to discount ebooks: there is very little cost involved in selling additional copies. Lets say I print 1000 copies of a book and sell them $20 a piece, I have $20,000 revenue. To sell more than that, I have to print and ship more, which will significantly increase my cost, so I only do it if I have a good reason to believe they will still sell for a good price.
With ebooks, let's say I publish an ebook, sell it for $20 a piece, and sell 1000 of them during the first two weeks. Then, during the next two months, I sell 5. That means nobody is willing to pay $20 for my book anymore. But there could be another 1000 people willing to pay $10, giving me additional $10000 revenue, with only a little increase in cost. Then I can sell another 2000 of them for $5 a piece, and finally I let people name their own price and sell 1,000,000 for $1 each on average.
If you are talking about Scratch playing with Lego NXT, take a look at this: http://enchanting.robotclub.ab.ca/tiki-index.php
If you are talking about Scratch on the pi, that should work out of the box.
Finally, if you want to use the Lego motors and sensors with the pi, I am not aware of any existing project, but I know that they have been used with an arduino, so it should be possible to drive them from the pi. It would be more powerful and probably cheaper than the new NXT brick, although I suspect that most of the cost of the Lego kit is due to the motors and sensors, rather than the brick itself.
Interesting. None of the schools my kids go to teaches Word or Excel. They teach english, essay writing, composition, science, etc., It is assumed that they will turn in their work typed, with graphs and tables when appropriate. Nobody bothers teaching them how to do it, as far as I can tell, they mostly just figure it out themselves. And nobody cares what specific software they use.
Exactly. It says nothing about "modern" bloated desktop environments. I have an old desktop computer that I use as a print server, and it crawls with lxde or xfce, but it is perfectly usable with something like fvwm or fluxbox, and runs gnumeric and abiword perfectly fine, as well as most games that are available in linux. I don't know if it plays HD video, I never tried it. It has 512 MB, but memory is almost never a problem, usually about half of that is free anyway.
What would be the expected path length in such thing?
In the case you are refering to the Sarajevo assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the assassins were right wing serbian nationalists, being about as far from anarchists as the iranian president is. If you are refering to some other event, will you please enlighten me?
Besides, nobody said everything has to be right wing. I hate communists, and for a good reason, as I had plenty of direct (very unplesant) experience with them, but clearly in the cases discussed here, the people involved undoubtedly are or were right wing extremists.
By the way, do you realize that, according to your definition of conservative, in a communist regime, the communists are the conservatives?
Not true, terain in nethack looks simply awesome!
the weapons of mass destruction.
Considering that artists were painting or drawing on vertical or nearly vertical surfaces for many centuries, maybe it was just a particularly bad design that made the pen hard to use.
On the other hand, the sample size is only determined by the confidence level, the population size is irrelevant.
The population size is actually irrelevant (provided it is large enough), at least for confidence intervals, which is what the sample size calculator does.
Indeed. I grew up under a communist dictatorship, and most of the thgings that the "copyright dictators" are trying to force down our throats would make communist censors and police drool with excitement.
That's gonna come next.
Thankfully for the rest of us, you would fail cop training on this point before even remotely managing to become a LEO.
He would then go on to become a mall security thug.
Is it stupid to assume that the intelligence (or stupidity) has the same mean as median?
Hm, seems to me like they reinvented pixmap.
Then perhaps US drivers should get the same type of driving instructions given in, say, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahaha! .......
5 minutes later:
Ehm, sorry. Perhaps US drivers should get driving instructions, period. But no, that would probably infringe on some sort of civil liberty and endanger our freedom.
Clojure is pretty cool, and it compiles to the JVM code, but I have never heard about it being a replacement for JavaScript. In which sense would it replace JavaScript?
When I was working in aerospace, we would often write the manual first, then implement.
I remember back in 80's having to deal with a manual that was obviously written this way. It was the C api for the INFORMIX database system. The first third of the manual was basically the specification, each function was listed with its prototype, description etc. When I started reading it, it seems like an excellent, very powerful system. The problem was that the remaining two thirds of the manual were a list of errors. Few examples: Error 234: such and such function only works with integer arguments. Error 135: such and such function only works with strings that are no longer than 128 characters. There were hundreds of them, in no particular order. It seems that they first wrote the specification, then someone wrote a really shitty incomplete implementation, and then, during testing, every time they ran into a bug or a limitation, instead of fixing the bug or at least changing the specification to reflect the limitation, they made the code to generate an error message with a specific number, and they added a description of the error to the back of the manual. Needles to say, the whole thing was a freaking nightmare to use.
is that you? I would expect you having considerably lower id!
such as the impact on the quality of the resulting textbooks
Yes, we definitely should stop this insanity right now! There is a chance that the textbooks thus produced will be of low quality! The humankind would definitely not be able to survive that!
Actually, I think we will survive just fine, considering that we are currently surviving a huge ammount of incredibly shitty textbooks from our major publishers.
Couple years ago, we outsourced our bookstore to Barnes and Noble, because we simply could not afford running it any more. We kept sinking money into it semester after semester. Large booksellers are better equipped to handle the "sell large amount of textbooks at the beginning of each semester and then keep the remaining copies around in a storage, sending the ones that will not be needed next semester back to the publisher, buying book back from students at the end of the semester, and getting ready for the new semester" cycle.
As far as professors writing their own course materials, that fairly common. Typically, these are sold for the cost of printing and binding. I have never seen a professor actually getting any money for these. The main problem is that it takes time, and at our college, with our teaching load, service, and need to keep current in the field, there is very little time for writing these. I have been working on a textbook like that for one of my classes for several years, and I am nowhere near finishing.