I think that there are a couple of factors. One is the financial one. The other is that doctors regard going without sleep as a rite of passage. They did it when they were residents so those who come after them should too. It's a stupid macho thing, like surgeons wearing clothes encrusted with blood and gore until the late nineteenth century.
I found David Beazley's Python: Essential Reference
more useful than the O'Reilly Learning Python. It isn't suitable for novice programmers, but for experienced programmers learning Python I think it is excellant. In spite of the title, it isn't simply a reference manual.
It's better than Dice as a measure of what programmers like since the language of a Freshmeat project will generally be chosen by the programmers while that of a job offered on Dice will generally be chosen by the employer. We also have some idea, albeit an imperfect one, of how it relates to what developers in general use, precisely because of the orientation of Freshmeat to Free Software. As I said, in the MS Windows world some differences would be predictable, e.g. a much higher usage of Visual Basic.
Here are the current Freshmeat statistics. The numbers are the number of projects in the specified programming language. I've omitted those with fewer than 10 projects. They probably give a fairly good idea of the popularity of programming languages if you take into account the bias toward the Free Software world. In the MS Windows world Visual Basic, for example, would no doubt rank much higher. Also note that these are cumulative over the past 6 years or so.
For the scripting languages, Perl and PHP lead, followed by Python, then Javascript, then Tcl. Ruby still isn't that popular on Freshmeat, and Lua, REXX and Pike hardly register.
I wonder if the Chinese student who said he needed Wikipedia for his thesis was referring to a senior thesis? A senior thesis is relatively uncommon in the US but more common in some other countries.
This isn't simply a case of a company complying with local law. China's censorship of Zhao's blog is actually illegal under Chinese law.
It violates article 35 of The Constitution of the People's Republic of China, which guarantees freedom of speech and article 41, which specifically protects the right to criticize the government. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Microsoft acted in response to the order of a court. What we're talking about here is compliance with an illegal request. There may be an argument that Microsoft could not afford to refuse to comply, but any moral argument that Microsoft has an obligation to obey local law is bogus.
Re:let's reproduce Belmolis's results.
on
Chemical Words List
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My total time to find a list of the elements and create the regexp, which I actually did prior to reading OP's comment, plus finding and downloading a copy of the ENABLE list, was about ten minutes. For anyone with much experience using regular expressions constructing the regexp is pretty trivial. Even typing it all in manually while looking at a list of the elements can be done in a few minutes. So, sure, it isn't 25 hours vs. one second, but it is something like 25 hours vs. 10 minutes.
Actually, I only used the proper symbols, that is, the ones for the first 111 elements, so my regexp differs from the OPs in excluding
uub, uuh, uup, uuq, and uut. As it happens, the results are no different.
Re:One Line (Though a long one)
on
Chemical Words List
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I just compared my results, using egrep, with Nandor's.
He failed to find two valid words "berg" and "urges", but
found three non-words, "cryosurg ical", "urg es", and "v irgins".
The correct count is therefore 26,811.
Re:One Line (Though a long one)
on
Chemical Words List
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I ran this regular expression, using egrep, against the ENABLE wordlist. It took approximately ONE SECOND on a 1.6GHz P4 with 512MB RAM, not exactly a supercomputer. Mathematica is a great tool for some purposes, but not for this.
I did my thesis research at Bell Labs. There was a postdoc in our group who was just learning to use computers. One day, two of us hacked his account. We arranged for him to be immediately transferred to another machine. Then we changed all of the standard commands so that they did one of two things: either they printed their normal output but with every printing character replaced with an s or they printed the error message "s-inode overflow" followed by screenful after screenfull of s's. We did this one night and came in early the next morning so as to be sure to be there when he logged in.
We waited and waited but no outburst came. We hung around all day, wondering when he would log in, but nothing happened. We were terribly disappointed. Finally, the next day, around noon, we found him huddled with a technician. It turned out that the previous day he had logged in, noticed the weird behavior, decided that it was just one of those days, and logged out, figuring it would probably clear up! He was so mild-mannered and so inexperienced with computers that he had not reacted as we expected him to.
The other hack we did that year went better. One of the statisticians had a Monroe calculator in his office. For the younger generation, a Monroe calculation was a large electromechanical calculator, like an adding machine, but able to multiply and divide, and able to handle more digits, 16 I think. We used to go up to his office at night and play with it.
It made a lot of noise as it calculated: kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-ching! Different calculations would make it play different "tunes".
One night we lugged the thing down to the speech lab, set it up to play a particularly nice tune, and recorded it. We then modified the C compiler so that when invoked itwould play the Monroe calculator sound over the loudspeakers. People were surprised at the new auditory indication of how their compile was going.
Gitlow is not internally incoherent. The court held that the first amendment applied to the states, so that states may not arbitrarily infringe on freedom of speech, but that the particular sort of speech with which Gitlow was charged was legitimately subject to regulation. One can agree or disagree with exactly where the court drew the line, but it is well settled that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech is not absolute - there are kinds of speech that may be banned (e.g. revelation of classified information, incitement of a crime) or regulated (commercial speech such as advertising).
Since Gitlow v. New York 268 U.S. 652 (1925)
the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, has been considered to have been extended to the states by the second sentence of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This issue was actually considered long ago by Bell Labs. They studied
the question of whether it makes any difference whether a command is called "copy" or "cp", "del" or "rm", and so forth. They found that in fact it didn't make any difference.
I'd love to give a link but I haven't been able to find the paper using
Google and I've just moved and most of my books and papers are still in boxes so I can't find the paper version either.
Re:how about other toolkits?
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
I've seen the complaint that Tk looks awful on Unix but as I understand it the complaint is out of date as Tk on Unix has not been based on Motif for some time.
Do ordinary users still think that Tk looks awful? It looks fine to me, but I too am not a good judge of what the average user will like.
I don't have the book to hand and it is dated, but if I recall correctly
there is a good discussion of this topic in D'arcy Thompson's classic
On Growth and Form.
I don't know about that. I have been a touch-typist since I was 12 but I still alias the names of commonly used programs to a couple of letters. Even if you're a touch typist, it is faster to type two letters than more than two letters.
Actually, you can't in general take an organism and scale it beyond a fairly
limited range because structures that work at one size don't work at others.
For example, the strength of legs is approximately proportional to the square
of their diameter but body mass is proportional to the cube of body size, so ratios
of leg diameter to body size that work just fine for small organisms lead to collapse
when scaled up because weight increases disproportionately to leg strength. (This is
why the legs of elephants are thicker even in proportion to body size than those of ants.)
Wrong again. Only one previous response to your post made this point and mine contained additional information. Or is your "10th" meant to be binary?
how about other toolkits?
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
I'm surprised that nobody seems to have much to say about how GTK+ compares with other toolkits other than Qt. How does GTK+ compare to Tk and and WxWidgets? I'm curious in part because, after a long period of doing no graphics programming other than some tweaks to old programs, I went from using raw Xlib to Tk. I've studied GTK+ a little but haven't really used it. My impression is that GTK+ may have the advantage when you need very fine control, but that otherwise Tk is much faster to write and requires less code because it takes care of many of the details for you and chooses good defaults. The only comparisons of this larger set that I've seen are rather dated.
Public defenders are for criminal cases. This is a civil case.
With very limited exceptions, such as "civil" cases in which a government adjacency is seeking to take away custody of children,
defendants in civil cases are not provided with legal counsel by
the government.
GP was talking about "the political arena", by which he no doubt meant the media. Yes, it's true that it is only in the past six years that the Republicans have controlled both the Congress and the White House, but that is due in considerable part to the domination of the media by the right-wing and the increasing politicization of the media, where objective news has been replaced with right-wing propaganda. The right-wing takeover of the media and their transformation of the media into a propaganda machine has taken place over the past 20 years or so.
Possibly, but isn't it the case that, if we're just talking
about internet sales, the information necessary is less complex?
There isn't any consumption on the spot, for example, and in most cases no installation.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that there are a couple of factors. One is the financial one. The other is that doctors regard going without sleep as a rite of passage. They did it when they were residents so those who come after them should too. It's a stupid macho thing, like surgeons wearing clothes encrusted with blood and gore until the late nineteenth century.
I found David Beazley's Python: Essential Reference more useful than the O'Reilly Learning Python. It isn't suitable for novice programmers, but for experienced programmers learning Python I think it is excellant. In spite of the title, it isn't simply a reference manual.
It's better than Dice as a measure of what programmers like since the language of a Freshmeat project will generally be chosen by the programmers while that of a job offered on Dice will generally be chosen by the employer. We also have some idea, albeit an imperfect one, of how it relates to what developers in general use, precisely because of the orientation of Freshmeat to Free Software. As I said, in the MS Windows world some differences would be predictable, e.g. a much higher usage of Visual Basic.
Here are the current Freshmeat statistics. The numbers are the number of projects in the specified programming language. I've omitted those with fewer than 10 projects. They probably give a fairly good idea of the popularity of programming languages if you take into account the bias toward the Free Software world. In the MS Windows world Visual Basic, for example, would no doubt rank much higher. Also note that these are cumulative over the past 6 years or so.
For the scripting languages, Perl and PHP lead, followed by Python, then Javascript, then Tcl. Ruby still isn't that popular on Freshmeat, and Lua, REXX and Pike hardly register.
I wonder if the Chinese student who said he needed Wikipedia for his thesis was referring to a senior thesis? A senior thesis is relatively uncommon in the US but more common in some other countries.
OP made a typo. Try googling: chondrules.
This isn't simply a case of a company complying with local law. China's censorship of Zhao's blog is actually illegal under Chinese law. It violates article 35 of The Constitution of the People's Republic of China, which guarantees freedom of speech and article 41, which specifically protects the right to criticize the government. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Microsoft acted in response to the order of a court. What we're talking about here is compliance with an illegal request. There may be an argument that Microsoft could not afford to refuse to comply, but any moral argument that Microsoft has an obligation to obey local law is bogus.
My total time to find a list of the elements and create the regexp, which I actually did prior to reading OP's comment, plus finding and downloading a copy of the ENABLE list, was about ten minutes. For anyone with much experience using regular expressions constructing the regexp is pretty trivial. Even typing it all in manually while looking at a list of the elements can be done in a few minutes. So, sure, it isn't 25 hours vs. one second, but it is something like 25 hours vs. 10 minutes.
Actually, I only used the proper symbols, that is, the ones for the first 111 elements, so my regexp differs from the OPs in excluding uub, uuh, uup, uuq, and uut. As it happens, the results are no different.
I just compared my results, using egrep, with Nandor's. He failed to find two valid words "berg" and "urges", but found three non-words, "cryosurg ical", "urg es", and "v irgins". The correct count is therefore 26,811.
I ran this regular expression, using egrep, against the ENABLE wordlist. It took approximately ONE SECOND on a 1.6GHz P4 with 512MB RAM, not exactly a supercomputer. Mathematica is a great tool for some purposes, but not for this.
I did my thesis research at Bell Labs. There was a postdoc in our group who was just learning to use computers. One day, two of us hacked his account. We arranged for him to be immediately transferred to another machine. Then we changed all of the standard commands so that they did one of two things: either they printed their normal output but with every printing character replaced with an s or they printed the error message "s-inode overflow" followed by screenful after screenfull of s's. We did this one night and came in early the next morning so as to be sure to be there when he logged in.
We waited and waited but no outburst came. We hung around all day, wondering when he would log in, but nothing happened. We were terribly disappointed. Finally, the next day, around noon, we found him huddled with a technician. It turned out that the previous day he had logged in, noticed the weird behavior, decided that it was just one of those days, and logged out, figuring it would probably clear up! He was so mild-mannered and so inexperienced with computers that he had not reacted as we expected him to.
The other hack we did that year went better. One of the statisticians had a Monroe calculator in his office. For the younger generation, a Monroe calculation was a large electromechanical calculator, like an adding machine, but able to multiply and divide, and able to handle more digits, 16 I think. We used to go up to his office at night and play with it. It made a lot of noise as it calculated: kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-ching! Different calculations would make it play different "tunes".
One night we lugged the thing down to the speech lab, set it up to play a particularly nice tune, and recorded it. We then modified the C compiler so that when invoked itwould play the Monroe calculator sound over the loudspeakers. People were surprised at the new auditory indication of how their compile was going.
Gitlow is not internally incoherent. The court held that the first amendment applied to the states, so that states may not arbitrarily infringe on freedom of speech, but that the particular sort of speech with which Gitlow was charged was legitimately subject to regulation. One can agree or disagree with exactly where the court drew the line, but it is well settled that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech is not absolute - there are kinds of speech that may be banned (e.g. revelation of classified information, incitement of a crime) or regulated (commercial speech such as advertising).
Since Gitlow v. New York 268 U.S. 652 (1925) the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, has been considered to have been extended to the states by the second sentence of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
This issue was actually considered long ago by Bell Labs. They studied the question of whether it makes any difference whether a command is called "copy" or "cp", "del" or "rm", and so forth. They found that in fact it didn't make any difference.
I'd love to give a link but I haven't been able to find the paper using Google and I've just moved and most of my books and papers are still in boxes so I can't find the paper version either.
I've seen the complaint that Tk looks awful on Unix but as I understand it the complaint is out of date as Tk on Unix has not been based on Motif for some time. Do ordinary users still think that Tk looks awful? It looks fine to me, but I too am not a good judge of what the average user will like.
I don't have the book to hand and it is dated, but if I recall correctly there is a good discussion of this topic in D'arcy Thompson's classic On Growth and Form.
I don't know about that. I have been a touch-typist since I was 12 but I still alias the names of commonly used programs to a couple of letters. Even if you're a touch typist, it is faster to type two letters than more than two letters.
Actually, you can't in general take an organism and scale it beyond a fairly limited range because structures that work at one size don't work at others. For example, the strength of legs is approximately proportional to the square of their diameter but body mass is proportional to the cube of body size, so ratios of leg diameter to body size that work just fine for small organisms lead to collapse when scaled up because weight increases disproportionately to leg strength. (This is why the legs of elephants are thicker even in proportion to body size than those of ants.)
Wrong again. Only one previous response to your post made this point and mine contained additional information. Or is your "10th" meant to be binary?
I'm surprised that nobody seems to have much to say about how GTK+ compares with other toolkits other than Qt. How does GTK+ compare to Tk and and WxWidgets? I'm curious in part because, after a long period of doing no graphics programming other than some tweaks to old programs, I went from using raw Xlib to Tk. I've studied GTK+ a little but haven't really used it. My impression is that GTK+ may have the advantage when you need very fine control, but that otherwise Tk is much faster to write and requires less code because it takes care of many of the details for you and chooses good defaults. The only comparisons of this larger set that I've seen are rather dated.
Public defenders are for criminal cases. This is a civil case. With very limited exceptions, such as "civil" cases in which a government adjacency is seeking to take away custody of children, defendants in civil cases are not provided with legal counsel by the government.
GP was talking about "the political arena", by which he no doubt meant the media. Yes, it's true that it is only in the past six years that the Republicans have controlled both the Congress and the White House, but that is due in considerable part to the domination of the media by the right-wing and the increasing politicization of the media, where objective news has been replaced with right-wing propaganda. The right-wing takeover of the media and their transformation of the media into a propaganda machine has taken place over the past 20 years or so.
If all the complaints here about outsourcing are correct, rather than Java or C# you should learn Hindi.
Possibly, but isn't it the case that, if we're just talking about internet sales, the information necessary is less complex? There isn't any consumption on the spot, for example, and in most cases no installation.