Don't be so hard. A lot of the problems I was seeing were level design problems, and as they only had 24 hours to work out the kinks I think it's pretty impressive.
Apple doesn't want their OS to run on generic hardware because then they can't make it nearly as stable as it is on Mac hardware. That Mac OS has fewer hardware compatibility issues is kind of a no-brainer that way. Windows, being made to work with 3rd-party drivers on generic hardware, really does not have that advantage.
If I were Apple I'd probably choose inaction for a while. It wouldn't do to encourage this sort of thing because I could dilute the perceived user experience of owning a mac if it became less stable on generic hardware (which it almost certainly would). It also wouldn't do to discourage it right off the bat because this does have the potential to convert over some windows users if they can safely try it out.
The bottom line, though, is that these users didn't pay Apple for the hardware, so Apple will barely make any money off this.
Yeah but how many TV shows do you really care to see in hi-def? Is it really enough that you'd buy a whole new player and TV and everything just to be able to see them?
...or until the industry risks corporate suicide by stopping production of new DVDs to force adoption...
Going off of history I'm sure they wouldn't do that, but I have a feeling that people still wouldn't buy BDs. I think they'd turn to piracy instead. If you own a standard-def TV and a regular DVD player—which for the time being is a LOT of people (myself included)—why would you do anything else in the face of a DVD shortage?
Couple that with the fact that iTunes doesn't officially support taking music off your iPod back onto iTunes
For purchased music it does. If you hook up an iPod that belongs with your computer's library that contains purchased songs you don't have on your computer it will ask you if you want to move them to your computer from your iPod.
So, after the initial purchase, only charge the user for the bandwidth and not the bandwidth plus the license. I wouldn't have an issue with paying a few cents to restore a game to my hard drive if it meant that in the meantime I could have that space free for other things when I'm not playing that game for a long time.
You shouldn't be quoting any encyclopedia as a reference
Agreed, enthusiastically. Wikipedia is a great tool for finding clusters of primary sources relevant to a particular topic. Even if the article on wikipedia is a stub or is otherwise useless to you, if you're doing real research you need those real resources, and they're referenced right there at the bottom of the page. If they're not there, then look somewhere else for them (like, say, a library's actual catalog).
I would never directly quote Wikipedia for anything serious, nor would I quote Encyclopædia Britannica directly. That's for a different reason though: the information is likely to be at least a little bit outdated since I can only rely on it for the period in which the encyclopedia was published.
If you'll read the rest of this thread there's a lot of people who have provided reliable third-party sources (newspapers and magazine articles etc.) for these articles and they're still being deleted. I've run into similar problems with Wikipedia.
Ideally the community at large would make these decisions and the original authors' opinions on the matter would be heard. I don't think that happens there, though, as the sheer volume of information and people has forced a hierarchy into existence. The whole point was that it could exist without hierarchy and that idea wasn't scalable apparently. The whole system is broken and these issues are systemic throughout all of Wikipedia.
That's why he said the purity of it is debatable. Were it a "pure" functional language there would be no first-class objects but functions. Obviously that's not the case in Javascript, but it is a functional language in that it can be used in that style. Also, neither Python nor Perl count because you cannot define anonymous functions in either one.
This is an important distinction. In Python you can say "lambda x: 2 * x" and what you've got there is a lambda, but it is not a function; it's just an expression. In Javascript you can define actual, for real, bona fide functions and pass them as arguments inline, like so:
foo.prototype.bar = function (baz) {
do_something(baz);
do_something_else(baz);
return something(baz);
}
In Python you'd be restricted to kludging that all into one function (yes I know you can use boolean operators to trick it into doing multiple statements in the same lambda expression, but that's cheating and won't work all the time because the boolean operators short-circuit on a false return value).
Check out jQuery to see what it looks like when Javascript is written the right way.
Saying Haskell is useless just because you don't know how to write in that style is just like saying Perl is useless because you don't know how to use regular expressions. List comprehensions and functional mapping and folding are concepts that you might not learn in school without a theoretical background but learning how to use them and use them well will make you a better programmer.
It's the key difference between a "programmer" and a "computer scientist" and it really does make a difference in writing clean, elegant code. After you've been working in functional languages, suddenly for and while loops look ugly, global variables look like a joke from a previous century, and you start to see the simplicity of your code rather than being daunted by its complexity.
I love how people like to portray functional languages as academic exercises or feeble playthings—and maybe that's just from how you've been exposed to them—but they are real languages capable of real things, oftentimes performing better than imperative languages.
Yeah but most of the time that extra 10 or 15 minutes of thinking produces an elegantly simple function of only a few lines that replaces several dozen lines of equivalent C. And it's not that it requires tremendous amounts of thinking. Only when a problem has deviated from it's original mathematical basis does it become difficult to translate into functional style. Even the syntax of Haskell looks like math equations rendered into ASCII art. You can even have piecewise functions and write them in your code exactly how you'd see them in a math textbook.
When you're thinking of an algorithm imperatively already, though, it can be a little weird to translate all those loops into local recursive functions. Idioms like infinite lists and particularly complex list comprehensions can be tricky at first but really the style feels liberating once you've mastered it.
With languages like Ocaml that are type-strict I usually feel like what I've written is like the charcoal sketching I do under the paint on a canvas. The compiler just paints the actual painting over my expressive sketch.
Data structures, compiler design, operating system design - all of these require vastly different languages than purely functional ones.
Then why is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler written in Haskell? You can do absolutely anything that you can do in an imperative language in a functional language, oftentimes with far less code and sometimes running faster (YMMV). If you need definitive proof of this, such proof does exist.
Computer Science departments must teach concepts, and those require languages flexible enough to express different paradigms.
But functional languages use those very same concepts! Also, you can learn the nuts and bolts of programming without having to worry about segmentation faults and bus errors and java.lang.NullPointerExceptions. Newbies should be taught to program in a type-safe environment!
Seriously just check out the "Who's Using Haskell?" bit of the Haskell Wiki. You can't just disregard an entire style of programming just because it doesn't look like the languages you're used to.
Does anyone else find the practice of using the foreign-language version of "astronaut" a bit annoying?
No actually. It's more concise than saying "Russian astronaut" or "chinese astronaut". There's nothing wrong with having different words for different nationalities of astronauts; after all we have different words for people of different countries anyway.
It does though, in a way. Read Richard P. Feynman's books on quantum electrodynamics and you'll see that if you run time backwards matter behaves like antimatter. That is a horrible simplification and IANAP but that was my understanding of the material. Maybe a non-armchair physicist will come along and correct me?
It's true, and 99% of my complaints with windows are interface related. I'm a designer though so it's hard to argue with non-designer geeks about it. Seriously though take your fastest PC user and I'll be faster just by virtue of never being interrogated by my OS. "Where do you want to go today?" f*ck off and just let me do my work.
I'd been waiting for someone to bring that up and you just nailed it. Microsoft really can't play it off like OEM crapware isn't their responsibility, because they have agreements with all these OEMs. When I installed Ubuntu on my macbookpro, no software was included that wouldn't work. I know that sounds really stupid but think about it. When I bought the computer that's now my server, it had Windows XP and a handful of apps that I didn't care about on it. That's my experience. For someone who's kind of shaky on the whole "computer" situation, they'd assume those were part of Windows or just always come with it.
One of the reasons why Macs don't have these same problems is, again, that they exert some control over the situation. Your mac won't come with software that doesn't work on it; it won't come with malicious software or software that runs in the background and sucks up all your rams. It may come with iLife, which is just fine. If you decide you really hate it for some reason just drag it onto the trash and, wonder of wonders!, it's uninstalled just like that. The experience on Windows just really isn't the same at all. Everything is left in the hands of software developers, and Microsoft adopts a kind of laissez faire approach to how those should behave. That was fine in the 80s but it's a different world now and an operating system needs per-user and per-application permissions that are set to a safe level by default.
So when you take your shiny new Windows PC home and boot it up, it's not quite ready yet. You still have to uninstall all the crapware or you have to reinstall Windows just to start with a clean slate. Not the case with linux or mac os. You start up your mac for the first time and it's ready to rock and roll and everything just works without any effort on your part. Say what you will about Apple restricting what hardware or software you can use their OS with; at least when something goes wrong with it they 'fess up that it's their fault and not the fault of whoever sold you the hardware.
That's very closedminded though. The Universe is pretty damn supreme, and it's not a stretch to think of it as a being with whims and notions that we do not yet fully understand. Think of it sorta like gaia theory but extended well past our planet.
Bullshit. How do you prove that something was designed intelligently? Think about a car. How would you prove that an intelligent being designed a car if you didn't know who designed it and had no way of finding out? You could speculate endlessly about how the car was constructed with so many things in mind, how it works and how only an intelligent creator figure could have designed and built it, but how would you prove it? I say that you could not conclusively prove that any intelligent force had created it without making assumptions based on circumstance.
Ok so it's not a theory yet? It's not falsifiable right now so it's not a theory now, and I think most people who are familiar with the scientific method will agree that it's not going to be a theory in the future either. Creationism vs. everything else is a matter of opinion and a matter of philosophy or spirituality. It is completely and totally separate from the realm of scientific thinking. The two can exist perfectly fine alongside each other because science deals in theories and hypotheses, neither of these being a category into which creationism belongs.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be so hard. A lot of the problems I was seeing were level design problems, and as they only had 24 hours to work out the kinks I think it's pretty impressive.
doti: 1
Kaboom13: 0
Good shot.
Apple doesn't want their OS to run on generic hardware because then they can't make it nearly as stable as it is on Mac hardware. That Mac OS has fewer hardware compatibility issues is kind of a no-brainer that way. Windows, being made to work with 3rd-party drivers on generic hardware, really does not have that advantage.
If I were Apple I'd probably choose inaction for a while. It wouldn't do to encourage this sort of thing because I could dilute the perceived user experience of owning a mac if it became less stable on generic hardware (which it almost certainly would). It also wouldn't do to discourage it right off the bat because this does have the potential to convert over some windows users if they can safely try it out.
The bottom line, though, is that these users didn't pay Apple for the hardware, so Apple will barely make any money off this.
The mods were confused because he used the word "arsed".
Understood but still you need some extra gear. At that rate you just need the BD player though, so that's not too bad.
them's the cards and sometimes you need to know how to shuffle the deck
Or how to stack it.
Yeah but how many TV shows do you really care to see in hi-def? Is it really enough that you'd buy a whole new player and TV and everything just to be able to see them?
thats about as likely as a pig flying without a trebuchet....
That's why I put rockets on mine. Darn thing still hasn't flown back though.
...or until the industry risks corporate suicide by stopping production of new DVDs to force adoption...
Going off of history I'm sure they wouldn't do that, but I have a feeling that people still wouldn't buy BDs. I think they'd turn to piracy instead. If you own a standard-def TV and a regular DVD player—which for the time being is a LOT of people (myself included)—why would you do anything else in the face of a DVD shortage?
Couple that with the fact that iTunes doesn't officially support taking music off your iPod back onto iTunes
For purchased music it does. If you hook up an iPod that belongs with your computer's library that contains purchased songs you don't have on your computer it will ask you if you want to move them to your computer from your iPod.
So, after the initial purchase, only charge the user for the bandwidth and not the bandwidth plus the license. I wouldn't have an issue with paying a few cents to restore a game to my hard drive if it meant that in the meantime I could have that space free for other things when I'm not playing that game for a long time.
You shouldn't be quoting any encyclopedia as a reference
Agreed, enthusiastically. Wikipedia is a great tool for finding clusters of primary sources relevant to a particular topic. Even if the article on wikipedia is a stub or is otherwise useless to you, if you're doing real research you need those real resources, and they're referenced right there at the bottom of the page. If they're not there, then look somewhere else for them (like, say, a library's actual catalog).
I would never directly quote Wikipedia for anything serious, nor would I quote Encyclopædia Britannica directly. That's for a different reason though: the information is likely to be at least a little bit outdated since I can only rely on it for the period in which the encyclopedia was published.
If you'll read the rest of this thread there's a lot of people who have provided reliable third-party sources (newspapers and magazine articles etc.) for these articles and they're still being deleted. I've run into similar problems with Wikipedia.
Ideally the community at large would make these decisions and the original authors' opinions on the matter would be heard. I don't think that happens there, though, as the sheer volume of information and people has forced a hierarchy into existence. The whole point was that it could exist without hierarchy and that idea wasn't scalable apparently. The whole system is broken and these issues are systemic throughout all of Wikipedia.
That's why he said the purity of it is debatable. Were it a "pure" functional language there would be no first-class objects but functions. Obviously that's not the case in Javascript, but it is a functional language in that it can be used in that style. Also, neither Python nor Perl count because you cannot define anonymous functions in either one.
This is an important distinction. In Python you can say "lambda x: 2 * x" and what you've got there is a lambda, but it is not a function; it's just an expression. In Javascript you can define actual, for real, bona fide functions and pass them as arguments inline, like so:
foo.prototype.bar = function (baz) {
do_something(baz);
do_something_else(baz);
return something(baz);
}
In Python you'd be restricted to kludging that all into one function (yes I know you can use boolean operators to trick it into doing multiple statements in the same lambda expression, but that's cheating and won't work all the time because the boolean operators short-circuit on a false return value).
Check out jQuery to see what it looks like when Javascript is written the right way.
Saying Haskell is useless just because you don't know how to write in that style is just like saying Perl is useless because you don't know how to use regular expressions. List comprehensions and functional mapping and folding are concepts that you might not learn in school without a theoretical background but learning how to use them and use them well will make you a better programmer.
It's the key difference between a "programmer" and a "computer scientist" and it really does make a difference in writing clean, elegant code. After you've been working in functional languages, suddenly for and while loops look ugly, global variables look like a joke from a previous century, and you start to see the simplicity of your code rather than being daunted by its complexity.
I love how people like to portray functional languages as academic exercises or feeble playthings—and maybe that's just from how you've been exposed to them—but they are real languages capable of real things, oftentimes performing better than imperative languages.
Holy shit, sir. You win at Slashdot today.
Yeah but most of the time that extra 10 or 15 minutes of thinking produces an elegantly simple function of only a few lines that replaces several dozen lines of equivalent C. And it's not that it requires tremendous amounts of thinking. Only when a problem has deviated from it's original mathematical basis does it become difficult to translate into functional style. Even the syntax of Haskell looks like math equations rendered into ASCII art. You can even have piecewise functions and write them in your code exactly how you'd see them in a math textbook.
When you're thinking of an algorithm imperatively already, though, it can be a little weird to translate all those loops into local recursive functions. Idioms like infinite lists and particularly complex list comprehensions can be tricky at first but really the style feels liberating once you've mastered it.
With languages like Ocaml that are type-strict I usually feel like what I've written is like the charcoal sketching I do under the paint on a canvas. The compiler just paints the actual painting over my expressive sketch.
Data structures, compiler design, operating system design - all of these require vastly different languages than purely functional ones.
Then why is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler written in Haskell? You can do absolutely anything that you can do in an imperative language in a functional language, oftentimes with far less code and sometimes running faster (YMMV). If you need definitive proof of this, such proof does exist.
Computer Science departments must teach concepts, and those require languages flexible enough to express different paradigms.
But functional languages use those very same concepts! Also, you can learn the nuts and bolts of programming without having to worry about segmentation faults and bus errors and java.lang.NullPointerExceptions. Newbies should be taught to program in a type-safe environment!
Seriously just check out the "Who's Using Haskell?" bit of the Haskell Wiki. You can't just disregard an entire style of programming just because it doesn't look like the languages you're used to.
Does anyone else find the practice of using the foreign-language version of "astronaut" a bit annoying?
No actually. It's more concise than saying "Russian astronaut" or "chinese astronaut". There's nothing wrong with having different words for different nationalities of astronauts; after all we have different words for people of different countries anyway.
It does though, in a way. Read Richard P. Feynman's books on quantum electrodynamics and you'll see that if you run time backwards matter behaves like antimatter. That is a horrible simplification and IANAP but that was my understanding of the material. Maybe a non-armchair physicist will come along and correct me?
It's true, and 99% of my complaints with windows are interface related. I'm a designer though so it's hard to argue with non-designer geeks about it. Seriously though take your fastest PC user and I'll be faster just by virtue of never being interrogated by my OS. "Where do you want to go today?" f*ck off and just let me do my work.
I'd been waiting for someone to bring that up and you just nailed it. Microsoft really can't play it off like OEM crapware isn't their responsibility, because they have agreements with all these OEMs. When I installed Ubuntu on my macbookpro, no software was included that wouldn't work. I know that sounds really stupid but think about it. When I bought the computer that's now my server, it had Windows XP and a handful of apps that I didn't care about on it. That's my experience. For someone who's kind of shaky on the whole "computer" situation, they'd assume those were part of Windows or just always come with it.
One of the reasons why Macs don't have these same problems is, again, that they exert some control over the situation. Your mac won't come with software that doesn't work on it; it won't come with malicious software or software that runs in the background and sucks up all your rams. It may come with iLife, which is just fine. If you decide you really hate it for some reason just drag it onto the trash and, wonder of wonders!, it's uninstalled just like that. The experience on Windows just really isn't the same at all. Everything is left in the hands of software developers, and Microsoft adopts a kind of laissez faire approach to how those should behave. That was fine in the 80s but it's a different world now and an operating system needs per-user and per-application permissions that are set to a safe level by default.
So when you take your shiny new Windows PC home and boot it up, it's not quite ready yet. You still have to uninstall all the crapware or you have to reinstall Windows just to start with a clean slate. Not the case with linux or mac os. You start up your mac for the first time and it's ready to rock and roll and everything just works without any effort on your part. Say what you will about Apple restricting what hardware or software you can use their OS with; at least when something goes wrong with it they 'fess up that it's their fault and not the fault of whoever sold you the hardware.
That's very closedminded though. The Universe is pretty damn supreme, and it's not a stretch to think of it as a being with whims and notions that we do not yet fully understand. Think of it sorta like gaia theory but extended well past our planet.
Bullshit. How do you prove that something was designed intelligently? Think about a car. How would you prove that an intelligent being designed a car if you didn't know who designed it and had no way of finding out? You could speculate endlessly about how the car was constructed with so many things in mind, how it works and how only an intelligent creator figure could have designed and built it, but how would you prove it? I say that you could not conclusively prove that any intelligent force had created it without making assumptions based on circumstance.
Ok so it's not a theory yet? It's not falsifiable right now so it's not a theory now, and I think most people who are familiar with the scientific method will agree that it's not going to be a theory in the future either. Creationism vs. everything else is a matter of opinion and a matter of philosophy or spirituality. It is completely and totally separate from the realm of scientific thinking. The two can exist perfectly fine alongside each other because science deals in theories and hypotheses, neither of these being a category into which creationism belongs.