I guess it depends on your view of what "Star Trek" is. The concept of "Star Trek" is very broad, given the vast distance between the original version and the later incarnations. For example the "goodies and baddies" vibe of the first series was replaced by an aggressively post-modern "everyone is right in their own way" vibe in later series.
Personally I loved the Star Trek reboot and it definitely fitted my view of "Star Trek" pretty well: That is to say, a good story with some pantomime villains, some decent actions scenes, an attempt at personal relationships, a few laughs, and none of the actors taking it too seriously.
And, yes, I watched Star Trek from the early days: it was the first program I ever saw on a colour TV.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but Python is inherently strongly typed.
It is difficult to be pedantic about strong typing because there is no clear definition of what it means. Wikipedia will tell you that Liskov gave a definition of "strongly typed" that is closer to our current usage of "statically typed".
Python has support for some basic types, but it does not support typing for lists, enumerations, structures or functions. You can test the class of an object, but you cannot tell if two objects have the same or related classes. And Python allows you change the members and methods of a class after it is declared, so knowing the class doesn't really help much anyway.
In my view Python lacks a sufficiently rich type system to be classed as "strongly typed", but YMMV.
[And before you decide, look at Scala to see a rich type system that supports both static and dynamic typing of all data types ]
I think we all knew that Bill Nye would not have made a statement like in the headline. It's just clickbait, but people want to complain about it anyway.
Really not sure if this is sarcasm or not. The headline is "Bill Nye explains that the flooding in Louisiana is the result of climate change" and in the video he is asked about the flooding in Louisiana and says "This is the result of climate change" so it is really not clear what the problem is what that headline.
Or more accurately Bill Nye says "it is reasonable that these storms are connected to [climate change]", and the media cannot understand the difference between drawing a probable conclusion and drawing a definitive conclusion. Bill Nye never said this was absolutely because of climate change.
Or more accurately, the very first thing that he says (46 secs into the video) is "This is the result of climate change, and its only going to get worse". No ifs, no buts, no probabilities, just a plain statement of fact.
And I don't buy the idea that he was misquoted and they twisted what he said. Bill Nye is a media personality who has been on the TV for decades, and he knows how to put his message across. He is savvy enough to know that this kind of remark will be picked up and used as headlines, and any equivocation that follows will be ignored. He is smart enough to know that he could have said "This might be the result of climate change" or "This could be the result of climate change" and it would have been reported that way.
I don't like 'drag lock' functions because then that makes more steps. You have to three finger click, and then drag, and then three finger click. Too many actions for one operation. With a mouse it is basically one action, hold button and move mouse.
With the Mac trackpad it is one action: Press with three fingers and drag.
Clicking with three fingers gives the Dictionary and Thesaurus:)
Just because they use it more doesn't make them more savvy. The burning video did them more harm than good.
I'm not sure what harm you think it caused them but it certainly helped them achieve their goals. It gained huge attention to their cause and doubtlessly encouraged many other people to join them. They want to fight the US so antagonising them is not harmful, so by their distorted morality it did them more good and no harm.
I'm not seeking to prove a claim. It's just the way things are.
Nice.
Accordingly a CPU with a real Huffman coded instruction set might be even better.
The additional cost of caching, decoding and branching with bit-aligned variable-length instructions would outweigh any benefit from reduced instruction fetch bandwidth. It would take more gates and more energy, which is why nobody does it. Talk to the people at Intel and ARM who know about this sort of thing, or look at the trends in instruction set design for high-performance CPUs and ask yourself why none of them have gone in this direction.
The exception to this is situations where code space is very tight or memory bandwidth is very low, which is true is some embedded environments but not in high performance systems.
I don't need to presume, I know that they removed some complex instructions because they made the hardware more complex and reduced performance.
Which contradicts the evidence of the vast majority of CPUs ever made, which is they get faster as you throw more gates at them.
More gates only make CPUs faster if they are doing useful work. Wasting gates on complex decode or complex instruction semantics reduces performance.
there is a linear relationship between code density and the functional bandwidth of the instruction caching at every level.
Even if this were true (which it isn't), and even if you were right that CISC has twice the code density of RISC (which it doesn't), it would still be a long way short of proving your claim that CISC gives better performance than RISC.
I don't presume to understand why ARM do what they do.
I don't need to presume, I know that they removed some complex instructions because they made the hardware more complex and reduced performance.
I don't know what the use case for ARM would be. They have less performance per thread, a smaller maximum system image and a few other downsides.
ARM servers should have lower power per operation, which is a critical factor for data centres. So far this theoretical advantage hasn't been fully realised, but neither has it been comprehensively disproved.
The Huffman like encoding of CISC instructions is certainly more beneficial for performance than the benefits of a 'simpler' instruction format which take twice the instruction bandwidth to do the same thing.
This is far from certain. Most instruction sets are decoded into mutliple RISC-like instructions (uops) which are then executed. The advantage of having a more compact instruction set is balanced by the greater energy required to decode those instructions, so there is no clear winner either way.
If the benefits of CISC are so great, why did ARM remove complex instructions from their 64-bit architecture rather than adding new ones?
In the EU this is called Autonomous Early Braking and is effecively mandatory on all new cars (you don't get an NCAP rating without it). The argument, as others have explained, is not that this technology is foolproof but that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
I've no idea if EU cars will keep this feature in US models, but it would be great if we could use the same terminology on both sides of the Atlantic.
Resolution has always referred to the number of pixels available on the screen.
Resolution has multiple meanings, this one is a late arrival to the list. In the early days of Computer Graphics the term was used in the scientific sense that applies, for example, to telescopes.
I don't object to this new meaning, but it is simply not true to say that this is the only meaning of that word in the context of electronic displays.
You mean the physician (not a scientist) who started the anti-vax movement?
Andrew Wakefield started the MMR controvesy by publishing a paper describing research that linked MMR to various negative outcomes. This clearly marks him out as a scientist not just a physician. This paper has since be shown to be both incorrect and fraudulent, so he was equally clearly an immoral person who used science to gain popularity.
As well as being pedantic I am also trying to make the serious point that scientists who become celebrities are not necessarily good scientists.
Scientist have political opinions too and they are just as entitled to express them as anyone else.
Indeed. But they are not entitled to present their opinions as science.
This is a very hard line to walk and it is easy to inadvertently add opinion to a scientific statement. For example, "Scientists are warning that infant mortality will fall significantly over the next 10 years" or "Scientists are warning that CO2 emissions will cause a rise in global temperatures". Both of these statements expression an opinion about a prediction rather than simply stating the prediction. Better to use neutral words to focus on the science not the opinion: "Scientists are predicting that infant mortality will fall significantly over the next 10 years" or "Scientists are predicting that CO2 emissions will cause a rise in global temperatures"
And, to be fair, these opinions are often added by the media in order to make the results more interesting.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
I wonder how you arrive at that "truth".
Simple, I saw it happen to someone close to me.
Even the arch-enemy of cannabis, Nora Volkow, head of NIDA, admits that they can't prove it because association is not causation.
Unfortunately you can't ethically perform the experiments that would prove this in the way that you would like. The fact is that a lot of medical evidence comes from looking at the results of long-term population studies which can show correlation but can never prove causation.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
Text: It is easier to read pages on top each other than side-by-side
There are these weird things called books that might dispute that assertion
Books are limited by physical constraits which require a continuous text to be divided into pages. Computers are not so restricted and provide flexible layout and continuous scrolling. In this situation a portrait screen is more appopriate because the eye finds it difficult to scan very long lines of text (which is why books are usually portrait and why wide pages are often divided into multiple columns).
The good news is that computers give you the flexibility to choose whichever option you prefer.
Command-line: You can see more lines of output
Reading log files with wrapped lines or writing long, one line scripts is far better on a landscape-oriented widescreen monitor. I'm not sure what's wrong with shift+Page Up if you need to see more lines of output.
My personal view is that if you are generating very long lines of output or typing very long command lines, you are doing something wrong.
I get 150 columns in portrait mode which is enough for me, YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
https://xkcd.com/927/
JJ Treks are good movies, but terrible Star Trek.
I guess it depends on your view of what "Star Trek" is. The concept of "Star Trek" is very broad, given the vast distance between the original version and the later incarnations. For example the "goodies and baddies" vibe of the first series was replaced by an aggressively post-modern "everyone is right in their own way" vibe in later series.
Personally I loved the Star Trek reboot and it definitely fitted my view of "Star Trek" pretty well: That is to say, a good story with some pantomime villains, some decent actions scenes, an attempt at personal relationships, a few laughs, and none of the actors taking it too seriously.
And, yes, I watched Star Trek from the early days: it was the first program I ever saw on a colour TV.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but Python is inherently strongly typed.
It is difficult to be pedantic about strong typing because there is no clear definition of what it means. Wikipedia will tell you that Liskov gave a definition of "strongly typed" that is closer to our current usage of "statically typed".
Python has support for some basic types, but it does not support typing for lists, enumerations, structures or functions. You can test the class of an object, but you cannot tell if two objects have the same or related classes. And Python allows you change the members and methods of a class after it is declared, so knowing the class doesn't really help much anyway.
In my view Python lacks a sufficiently rich type system to be classed as "strongly typed", but YMMV.
[And before you decide, look at Scala to see a rich type system that supports both static and dynamic typing of all data types ]
More to the point what kind of cryptography needs to be done nights and on the weekends?
The "Oh My God Someone's Hacked Our System And We Need A Fix RIGHT NOW" kind of Cryptography...
I think we all knew that Bill Nye would not have made a statement like in the headline. It's just clickbait, but people want to complain about it anyway.
Really not sure if this is sarcasm or not. The headline is "Bill Nye explains that the flooding in Louisiana is the result of climate change" and in the video he is asked about the flooding in Louisiana and says "This is the result of climate change" so it is really not clear what the problem is what that headline.
Or more accurately Bill Nye says "it is reasonable that these storms are connected to [climate change]", and the media cannot understand the difference between drawing a probable conclusion and drawing a definitive conclusion. Bill Nye never said this was absolutely because of climate change.
Or more accurately, the very first thing that he says (46 secs into the video) is "This is the result of climate change, and its only going to get worse". No ifs, no buts, no probabilities, just a plain statement of fact.
And I don't buy the idea that he was misquoted and they twisted what he said. Bill Nye is a media personality who has been on the TV for decades, and he knows how to put his message across. He is savvy enough to know that this kind of remark will be picked up and used as headlines, and any equivocation that follows will be ignored. He is smart enough to know that he could have said "This might be the result of climate change" or "This could be the result of climate change" and it would have been reported that way.
I don't like 'drag lock' functions because then that makes more steps. You have to three finger click, and then drag, and then three finger click. Too many actions for one operation. With a mouse it is basically one action, hold button and move mouse.
With the Mac trackpad it is one action: Press with three fingers and drag.
Clicking with three fingers gives the Dictionary and Thesaurus :)
Just because they use it more doesn't make them more savvy. The burning video did them more harm than good.
I'm not sure what harm you think it caused them but it certainly helped them achieve their goals. It gained huge attention to their cause and doubtlessly encouraged many other people to join them. They want to fight the US so antagonising them is not harmful, so by their distorted morality it did them more good and no harm.
>Talk to the people at Intel and ARM who know about this
I am one of those people.
If Intel think that bit-aligned variable-length instructions are a good idea then they are in more trouble than I thought.
I'm not seeking to prove a claim. It's just the way things are.
Nice.
Accordingly a CPU with a real Huffman coded instruction set might be even better.
The additional cost of caching, decoding and branching with bit-aligned variable-length instructions would outweigh any benefit from reduced instruction fetch bandwidth. It would take more gates and more energy, which is why nobody does it. Talk to the people at Intel and ARM who know about this sort of thing, or look at the trends in instruction set design for high-performance CPUs and ask yourself why none of them have gone in this direction.
The exception to this is situations where code space is very tight or memory bandwidth is very low, which is true is some embedded environments but not in high performance systems.
I don't need to presume, I know that they removed some complex instructions because they made the hardware more complex and reduced performance.
Which contradicts the evidence of the vast majority of CPUs ever made, which is they get faster as you throw more gates at them.
More gates only make CPUs faster if they are doing useful work. Wasting gates on complex decode or complex instruction semantics reduces performance.
there is a linear relationship between code density and the functional bandwidth of the instruction caching at every level.
Even if this were true (which it isn't), and even if you were right that CISC has twice the code density of RISC (which it doesn't), it would still be a long way short of proving your claim that CISC gives better performance than RISC.
I don't presume to understand why ARM do what they do.
I don't need to presume, I know that they removed some complex instructions because they made the hardware more complex and reduced performance.
I don't know what the use case for ARM would be. They have less performance per thread, a smaller maximum system image and a few other downsides.
ARM servers should have lower power per operation, which is a critical factor for data centres. So far this theoretical advantage hasn't been fully realised, but neither has it been comprehensively disproved.
The Huffman like encoding of CISC instructions is certainly more beneficial for performance than the benefits of a 'simpler' instruction format which take twice the instruction bandwidth to do the same thing.
This is far from certain. Most instruction sets are decoded into mutliple RISC-like instructions (uops) which are then executed. The advantage of having a more compact instruction set is balanced by the greater energy required to decode those instructions, so there is no clear winner either way.
If the benefits of CISC are so great, why did ARM remove complex instructions from their 64-bit architecture rather than adding new ones?
We'll need engineers in 20 years, that would be a fairly safe bet... Probably lawyers too... And doctors...
I'm not sure we need lawyers now, let alone in 20 years
In the EU this is called Autonomous Early Braking and is effecively mandatory on all new cars (you don't get an NCAP rating without it). The argument, as others have explained, is not that this technology is foolproof but that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
I've no idea if EU cars will keep this feature in US models, but it would be great if we could use the same terminology on both sides of the Atlantic.
Resolution has always referred to the number of pixels available on the screen.
Resolution has multiple meanings, this one is a late arrival to the list. In the early days of Computer Graphics the term was used in the scientific sense that applies, for example, to telescopes.
I don't object to this new meaning, but it is simply not true to say that this is the only meaning of that word in the context of electronic displays.
D [] is a lot closer to "C++11 with simpler syntax" than Go.
Another plus point for Go
Scientists become celebrities than celebrities becoming scientists
With the possible exception of Brian May :)
You mean the physician (not a scientist) who started the anti-vax movement?
Andrew Wakefield started the MMR controvesy by publishing a paper describing research that linked MMR to various negative outcomes. This clearly marks him out as a scientist not just a physician. This paper has since be shown to be both incorrect and fraudulent, so he was equally clearly an immoral person who used science to gain popularity.
As well as being pedantic I am also trying to make the serious point that scientists who become celebrities are not necessarily good scientists.
Scientist have political opinions too and they are just as entitled to express them as anyone else.
Indeed. But they are not entitled to present their opinions as science.
This is a very hard line to walk and it is easy to inadvertently add opinion to a scientific statement. For example, "Scientists are warning that infant mortality will fall significantly over the next 10 years" or "Scientists are warning that CO2 emissions will cause a rise in global temperatures". Both of these statements expression an opinion about a prediction rather than simply stating the prediction. Better to use neutral words to focus on the science not the opinion: "Scientists are predicting that infant mortality will fall significantly over the next 10 years" or "Scientists are predicting that CO2 emissions will cause a rise in global temperatures"
And, to be fair, these opinions are often added by the media in order to make the results more interesting.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
I wonder how you arrive at that "truth".
Simple, I saw it happen to someone close to me.
Even the arch-enemy of cannabis, Nora Volkow, head of NIDA, admits that they can't prove it because association is not causation.
Unfortunately you can't ethically perform the experiments that would prove this in the way that you would like. The fact is that a lot of medical evidence comes from looking at the results of long-term population studies which can show correlation but can never prove causation.
I can't believe anyone can be stupid enough to think cannabis is dangerous enough to merit criminalization.
What you can or cannot believe isn't important, the truth is that canabis can have a devastating effect on the developing teenage mind. Even if you don't consider that enough to warrant criminalization, that does not justify insulting those of us who do.
Text: It is easier to read pages on top each other than side-by-side
There are these weird things called books that might dispute that assertion
Books are limited by physical constraits which require a continuous text to be divided into pages. Computers are not so restricted and provide flexible layout and continuous scrolling. In this situation a portrait screen is more appopriate because the eye finds it difficult to scan very long lines of text (which is why books are usually portrait and why wide pages are often divided into multiple columns).
The good news is that computers give you the flexibility to choose whichever option you prefer.
Command-line: You can see more lines of output
Reading log files with wrapped lines or writing long, one line scripts is far better on a landscape-oriented widescreen monitor. I'm not sure what's wrong with shift+Page Up if you need to see more lines of output.
My personal view is that if you are generating very long lines of output or typing very long command lines, you are doing something wrong.
I get 150 columns in portrait mode which is enough for me, YMMV.
So is tall screen good for anything else?
Coding: You get way more lines of code on the screen
Text: It is easier to read pages on top each other than side-by-side
Command-line: You can see more lines of output
Does it improve the picture now that you have twisted cables?
Make sure you rotate by -360 degress in the Southern Hemisphere or the electrons will get tangled.