Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And Al Capone opened Chicago's first soup line during the Depression. Most monopolists end up giving money away after they run out of things to buy for themselves. It's good PR and it makes them feel better about themselves, so what?
Historically the reason MS cared about which browser people used is because MS was afraid that the OS would become an irrelevant extension of the browser, ie commoditized. For strictly browser-based users, I think this is probably pretty close to happening.
But I think that MS will eventually lose because their people are probably getting cynical. They have had a lot of defections; their product is inferior and they know it; the management message that MS is an underdog that used to work to motivate people is getting thin. Bill Gates has always been very visible at the front of Microsoft (I don't even know who runs Cisco these days) and his personality and his "one of the boys" shtick is beginning to grate. Their marketing message, "our passion is letting you fulfill your potential" is bizarre.
Longhorn is slipping at about one-to-one at present and will probably continue to slip as it seems to suffer from aggravated second-system syndrome and grandiosity.
MS is going to lose the home users next as they are more budget concious and less demanding (web browsing and email).
Plane parachutes have been around for awhile; there's an example in the movie "The Gods Must be Crazy II". For most small planes, unless the wings fall off, you would probably try to land normally because once you pop the chute, you are at the mercy of high-tension lines, windmills, etc. A Cesna 152 lands at around 55 MPH, so it's not too hard to walk away if you ditch it in a field.
He's a twit. How did he get his code base in the first place? By copying it, under GPL, from a community of people who wrote it and released it. They didn't have veto power over others using their code and neither does he.
Actually, the Meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator, along a line through Paris. So the Earth's circumference almost exactly 40,000 km. The surveyors goofed a little but not enough to matter.
The problem with trying out 37 partners first is that all of them are playing the same game, and the odds are actually pretty low that you satisfy the woman's criteria and she satisfies yours. The model is just built from one person's point of view.
The Constitution is a "living document" that must be updated to take into account changing techologies, terrorism, drugs, kiddie porn, secret regulations, secret warrants, etc, etc. In other words, its a dead document.
I second this -- get some kind of internship or an on-campus job. Don't spend $30,000 a year going to MIT unless your parents are rich. Don't borrow if you can possibly avoid it.
Plus, a transfer might cost you a year -- not everything transfers.
If your folks are rich, go to MIT and have a good time!
It seems like this could lend itself to some image compression techniques. Especially for web image downloads, you could send the line drawing first and then fill in the interiors more quickly because the colors of the interiors are likely to be homogenous. This would be a good alternative to the current technique of sending a low-res image first and then overwriting it.
Obviously this magazine writer has never tried to write a code generator for an x86 FPU or Itanic, or he'd have a better idea of where Intel's problems might be coming from.
Yeah, beginner A can always code in his comfortable subset, right up until he has to debug beginner B's program, and B's subset and A's don't intersect. Which is why Perl is a write-only language.
It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.
Well, I fought the documentation and the documentation won:(
The bottom line is that, if I'm trying to teach a 12-year-old how to write a tic-tac-toe program, in Basic or Fortran or C it's basically: DIM BOARD[3][3], BOARD[1][1] = 3, print BOARD[1][1].
In Perl, it's: "Every expression is evaluated in a context, and the value of the expression depends on the context in which it's evaluated. Then I have to explain that precisely (note lack of cogent explanation above -- which limits itself to "because of context"). Then I have to explain the difference between an array and an array "reference". Then I have to introduce dollar signs, at signs, curly braces, and parentheses into the syntax. Why would I want to explain "array reference" and "contextual evaluation" when I'm trying to explain arrays and scalars? Context in particular is a real bugbear, because it means that the answer to every question is always "it depends".
Now if I can only figure out how to keep them from getting stolen, I'm home free. An eighty-dollar floodlight item that some kid can steal in two minutes.
I put two 100-dollar solar-powered motion lights on two different houses and they both got swiped.
This would make sense if all Maps were the same, but obviously programmers pick one kind of Map because they expect it to have unique BEHAVIOR. Hash tables have O(1) access times. B-trees have log access time but have ordered keys. Vectors are only accessible by integers. If all types of Maps had IDENTICAL interfaces there would be no need for different implementations. == To put it very simply: people design different data structures BECAUSE they BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY. Their BEHAVIOR IS DIFFERENT. You cannot treat them all the same, all the time, without paying a price. == Make the interface as simple as you can. Don't worry about hiding the implementation. The only way of hiding the implementation of a hash table would be to add predicates (map.orderedKeys(), map.constantAccess(), map.integerKeys(), etc) and that would complicate the interface.
In fact, I'll go a step farther and claim that the difficulty in modifying a system is linearly related to the total size of all of its public interfaces. This whole deal of hiding the implementation at any cost presumes that the implementation is complex and the interface can be made simple. If the class is just a bag of field values, the simplest and most transparent interface is to just make them all public.
Clearly if the interface is more complicated than the implementation, it would be better to just expose the implementation. An object should expose the simplest interface that it can. To say that an object should hide its implementation, even if this makes the interface more complicated, is throwing out the baby with the cart before the horse.
>A fundamental precept of OO systems is that an >object should not expose any of its implementation >details.
So the implementation is exposed but not used? Or maybe the comment referred to novel meanings of the words "fundamental" and "expose", with which I'm not familiar?
>A fundamental precept of OO systems is that an >object should not expose any of its implementation >details.
That's why we don't call hash tables HashTables, we call them "unorderedBagsIndexedByArbitraryKeysWithConstantTi me Acces", because that describes the PROPERTIES of the class rather than the IMPLEMENTATION. Oh, wait...
Doing a Lisp MAP in Java is pretty painful, as is doing pretty much anything that treats functions as first-class datatypes, allowing composition, maps, reduction, etc, etc. Write me a Java function that takes two Java functions f and g, and returns their composition f(g(x)) as a Java function...
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And Al Capone opened Chicago's first soup line during the Depression. Most monopolists end up giving money away after they run out of things to buy for themselves. It's good PR and it makes them feel better about themselves, so what?
Historically the reason MS cared about which browser people used is because MS was afraid that the OS would become an irrelevant extension of the browser, ie commoditized. For strictly browser-based users, I think this is probably pretty close to happening.
But I think that MS will eventually lose because their people are probably getting cynical. They have had a lot of defections; their product is inferior and they know it; the management message that MS is an underdog that used to work to motivate people is getting thin. Bill Gates has always been very visible at the front of Microsoft (I don't even know who runs Cisco these days) and his personality and his "one of the boys" shtick is beginning to grate. Their marketing message, "our passion is letting you fulfill your potential" is bizarre.
Longhorn is slipping at about one-to-one at present and will probably continue to slip as
it seems to suffer from aggravated second-system syndrome and grandiosity.
MS is going to lose the home users next as they are more budget concious and less demanding (web browsing and email).
Plane parachutes have been around for awhile; there's an example in the movie "The Gods Must be Crazy II". For most small planes, unless the wings fall off, you would probably try to land normally because once you pop the chute, you are at the mercy of high-tension lines, windmills, etc. A Cesna 152 lands at around 55 MPH, so it's not too hard to walk away if you ditch it in a field.
He's a twit. How did he get his code base in the first place? By copying it, under GPL, from a community of people who wrote it and released it.
They didn't have veto power over others using their code and neither does he.
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Any theories why Slate gets more traffic?
Actually, the Meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator, along a line through Paris. So the Earth's circumference almost exactly 40,000 km. The surveyors goofed a little but not enough to matter.
I heard that HP started drug testing and Dave Packard made them stop; then they started it back up the day he retired. Is that true?
The problem with trying out 37 partners first is that all of them are playing the same game, and the odds are actually pretty low that you satisfy the woman's criteria and she satisfies yours. The model is just built from one person's point of view.
At least their marketing department has figured out how dumb it is to name an OS for the year of its anticipated release.
The Constitution is a "living document" that must be updated to take into account changing techologies, terrorism, drugs, kiddie porn, secret regulations, secret warrants, etc, etc. In other words, its a dead document.
The smoke seems to be coming from the boat engine -- probably it was just started. Sailboats usually have small engines as backup propulsion.
I second this -- get some kind of internship or an on-campus job. Don't spend $30,000 a year going to MIT unless your parents are rich. Don't borrow if you can possibly avoid it.
Plus, a transfer might cost you a year -- not everything transfers.
If your folks are rich, go to MIT and have a good time!
It seems like this could lend itself to some image compression techniques. Especially for web
image downloads, you could send the line drawing first and then fill in the interiors more quickly
because the colors of the interiors are likely to be homogenous. This would be a good alternative to the current technique of sending a low-res image first and then overwriting it.
Obviously this magazine writer has never tried to write a code generator for an x86 FPU or Itanic, or he'd have a better idea of where Intel's problems might be coming from.
Yeah, beginner A can always code in his comfortable subset, right up until he has to debug beginner B's program, and B's subset and A's don't intersect. Which is why Perl is a write-only language.
It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.
Well, I fought the documentation and the documentation won :(
The bottom line is that, if I'm trying to teach a 12-year-old how to write a tic-tac-toe program, in Basic or Fortran or C it's basically: DIM BOARD[3][3], BOARD[1][1] = 3, print BOARD[1][1].
In Perl, it's: "Every expression is evaluated in a context, and the value of the expression depends on the context in which it's evaluated. Then I have to explain that precisely (note lack of cogent explanation above -- which limits itself to "because of context"). Then I have to explain the difference between an array and an array "reference". Then I have to introduce dollar signs, at signs, curly braces, and parentheses into the syntax. Why would I want to explain "array reference" and "contextual evaluation" when I'm trying to explain arrays and scalars? Context in particular is a real bugbear, because it means that the answer to every question is always "it depends".
Perl's a great beginner's language until you go beyond single-dimensional arrays.
l ).
@b=((0.8,0.9,1),2,3,4);
$b[0] => 0.8
because it flattened out the list for some reason.
Gotta love those at-signs and dollar-signs.
You have to say
@b = ([(0.8, 0.9, 1)], 2, 3, 4);
So the inner list needs brackets.
Why didn't the outer list need brackets?
Then you can say $b[0] and get ARRAY(0xb75eb0).
Well, maybe @b[0] will work, no that gives
ARRAY(0xb75eb0) also.
What you have to say is @($b[0]). Of course, how could I have missed that??
(The preceding cribbed from http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/text/perl.htm
Now if I can only figure out how to keep them from getting stolen, I'm home free. An eighty-dollar floodlight item that some kid can steal in two minutes.
I put two 100-dollar solar-powered motion lights on two different houses and they both got swiped.
Lisp has had NEQ for at least 30 years.
This would make sense if all Maps were the same, but obviously programmers pick one kind of Map because they expect it to have unique BEHAVIOR. Hash tables have O(1) access times. B-trees have log access time but have ordered keys. Vectors are only accessible by integers. If all types of Maps had IDENTICAL interfaces there would be no need for different implementations.
==
To put it very simply: people design different data structures BECAUSE they BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY. Their BEHAVIOR IS DIFFERENT. You cannot treat them all the same, all the time, without paying a price.
==
Make the interface as simple as you can. Don't worry about hiding the implementation. The only way of hiding the implementation of a hash table would be to add predicates (map.orderedKeys(), map.constantAccess(), map.integerKeys(), etc) and that would complicate the interface.
In fact, I'll go a step farther and claim that the difficulty in modifying a system is linearly related to the total size of all of its public interfaces. This whole deal of hiding the implementation at any cost presumes that the implementation is complex and the interface can be made simple. If the class is just a bag of field values, the simplest and most transparent interface is to just make them all public.
Clearly if the interface is more complicated than the implementation, it would be better to just expose the implementation. An object should expose the simplest interface that it can. To say that an object should hide its implementation, even if this makes the interface more complicated, is throwing out the baby with the cart before the horse.
>A fundamental precept of OO systems is that an >object should not expose any of its implementation >details.
So the implementation is exposed but not used? Or maybe the comment referred to novel meanings of the words "fundamental" and "expose", with which I'm not familiar?
>A fundamental precept of OO systems is that an >object should not expose any of its implementation >details.
i me Acces", because that describes the PROPERTIES of the class rather than the IMPLEMENTATION. Oh, wait...
That's why we don't call hash tables HashTables, we call them "unorderedBagsIndexedByArbitraryKeysWithConstantT
Doing a Lisp MAP in Java is pretty painful, as is doing pretty much anything that treats functions as first-class datatypes, allowing composition, maps, reduction, etc, etc. Write me a Java function that takes two Java functions f and g, and returns their composition f(g(x)) as a Java function...