That's very true, if it is ultra-high traffic code I wouldn't use regular expressions for much, although you can improve performance a bit (even in the above example) by pre-compiling the pattern and using a static reference to it. How many times though do you run across terrible abuses of chained/nested substring calls (usually without bounds checking) to accomplish things like the above? This is just one area where regex is a godsend.
I challenge you to find a non-regex solution as nice as this:
url = url.replaceFirst('(://[^/]*)\\?','$1/?');
Java, in this case - but that's another beauty - you could implement the same pattern in any language that supports regex. I love it...I do love it so.
Wow, thank you. I should have been a little more diligent in my googling on this topic, or at the very least posted something about it on slashdot earlier:)
In all of the links to various attempts at modeling "simple" brains that I've been given it becomes clear that even the most rudimentary of brains requires an incredible amount of time and effort - in addition to massive amounts of storage space. I still believe that this path is the one that will eventually lead us to true AI and an understanding of human consciousness, albeit not for another hundred years or so.
Thanks for both of your replies - interesting stuff. Someone else posted this link in reply, it goes into pretty fine grained detail about efforts to model a fruit fly brain, pretty fascinating. The article points out that in addition to the extreme complexity of the actual connections, it is even more complex in that "firings" of the neurons aren't simple on/off firings, they can each fire at at different percentages. It also goes into the storage space required to store what they find - it's staggering.
I'd go from there to an ant brain. Maybe a mosquito is even too ambitious - I wonder if anyone has tried to simulate the nervous system of a sea sponge, or an earth worm...
I remember this story - the catch was that they simply (ha) set up a software brain simulation which had enough numbers of neurons and synapses (from the article: 760 million, 6 trillion, respectively) to put it above cat-scale, but as far as I can tell no actual attempt was made to virtually render a living brain in a computer.
The brain of an ant contains a mere 250K neurons, seems like it would be a cake walk after the cat-scale exercise:)
If I could go back and do it all over again I think I would spend my entire life trying to figure out how a mosquito's brain works. There must be research along these lines happening somewhere but you never hear about it - they are always trying to map out mouse brains, or some other small mammal.
Why so ambitious? Start small - if a computer program could be made that perfectly imitates a mosquito it would be a huge breakthrough.
Agreed. I personally think that the Unix command line shell with the standard suite of commands is the apex of the software productivity vs. usability graph.
Picture a bell curve, on the left extreme you have punch cards, in the middle is bash, and on the right extreme is "Angry Birds":)
They conflate "different" with "hard," and call Linux "hard" because they already learned Windows and Ubuntu is different.
I see what you are getting at, but I think a point that is missed is that for a person with no interest in learning anything new about computers - a base consumer (which I am not, I'm playing devil's advocate with this thread) - whether something is "different" or "hard" makes no difference when the thing to be avoided is "effort". If windows were to cease to exist tomorrow I have no doubt that the transition would be relatively smooth because linux has evolved into a very easy platform to use, as you point out. Alas, this will not be the case and the path of least resistance will continue to be windows for the foreseeable future.
Eventually your TV/DVD/Game console will probably be doing all sorts of computer kinda stuff and you will fondly remember how you could waste several hours figuring out how to put italics into your emails.:-)
Hah! That very well may be.
To the rest of your post, my point was not that I have a desire to switch completely to ubuntu, I was only trying to establish that if I as a tech savvy user capable of such a switch find that it's too much of a hassle to do so then it would certainly be beyond the reach of the subject of the parent's anecdote. I'll probably end up converting my windows box to ubuntu/centOS and using it as my web/DB/application/file server once I snag a new personal use laptop - which will either be a macbook or a windows 7 machine, haven't decided. In any case, thanks for your reply.
Fair question on the iTunes - I didn't mean to suggest that it would have to be iTunes, only that a suitably easy analog would have to be available to give the parent's anecdote legs. Based on other responses it sounds like there are such alternatives. That said, I still just don't see Ubuntu as a viable option for the archetypical lay-person (a receptionist in this case).
However, I could see going Ubuntu as the first step on a path that ends with the person buying the boxed windows OS and having a perfectly clean machine, ironically.
Not trolling...I guess I've always referred to a non-windows machine as an "OS box" (e.g. "linux box", "solaris box"). Anyway, thanks for the response - you've confirmed my suspicion that to accomplish these things there would indeed be some faffing involved, albeit not a huge amount for the tech savvy.
I'm not trying to bust you on this, I am genuinely interested in how easy it would be for this subject to:
* Purchase + install a webcam and use skype
* Open, modify, save, and email a recipe sent in.docx format
* Sync an iPod/iPad to an installation of iTunes
* Play music through a home stereo system (ala Apple AirPort Express)
These are things that I have had to do recently or do every day with my PC. I am 10+ year software developer, I have an ancient SUSE linux box for serving files, a macbook, a PC desktop, and a Windows work laptop. I also have a job from hell, and a 19-month old daughter which leaves no time or desire to faff around with getting these things to work on Ubuntu - unless you tell me that it is exactly as easy as it is on a PC. If this is the case for me, I am guessing it is at least the case for the woman in your example.
BTW - please excuse the formatting, ever since the UI change I can't properly format my comments, and the FAQ has not been updated.
As I see it the only reason this practice is unethical (and I agree it is) is that the normal rules of the "fair" market are being subverted because the countries we offshore these jobs to do not have to abide by all of the environmental/human rights guidelines that we do (rightly, I believe), and can therefore run cheaper, and charge less. Because it is not illegal, as you point out, the free market insists on offshoring these jobs - it is so much cheaper to send these jobs offshore (at the very least 1:2 in the skilled IT market) that a hit on the quality side is acceptable.
As a result one would think that a solution to this problem would be to impose restrictions on our corporations as to which countries they can hire people in, based on the environmental laws and labor laws of the target country. I am assuming that you as a conservative view this as the government imposing morals and undue regulation on the free market. If I am correct in this assumption can you explain the contradiction?
This is to see if the text will bunch up after a lot of levels of replies because it used to be an annoying bug and it would be nice to see if it went away by now so please reply to this and try to make the sentence long so we can see if it bunches up.
This is a tired argument, and I have to agree with Americano's assessment on this one.
The simple fact is that college is the most convenient and obvious place to learn about whatever it is you are interested in learning about after high school - regardless of the implications towards employment. If you feel less bovine by sitting in a library and teaching yourself everything you are interested in learning then have at it. To brand (sorry) people that do choose to learn in a university as cattle stinks of jealousy and resentment on your part.
I think Ben Franklin put it best: "Learn of the skillful; he that teaches himself, has a fool for his master."
I had the same thought as RJHelms below - the paper (PDF) is great, but I do think it was meant only as a proof of concept/warning. I guess this is how rumors get started...
Well, you certainly have a point. Free speech in this country is under constant threat from every direction (I've seen mention of the "fairness doctrine" in response to Tucson, for instance). I do however believe that responding to these threats using language that implies a willingness or intention to commit acts of violence only serves to make them stronger.
Your fears are unfounded. The "right to rebel", or "right to revolution" is not something that can be revoked by the government, it's not like there's an amendment to the constitution that gives us the right to rise in an armed rebellion against the government (I'm aware that this is 2nd amendment bait...please refrain) It's a philosophical concept that every citizen of every government must define for themselves.
My argument is not to abolish the possibility of violent rhetoric for all time (an unattainable goal), rather it is for the current set of politicians to realize that such rhetoric is very serious, and should be reserved for those who have actual intention of rising up and causing death and destruction such as what we saw in Tuscon - as opposed to those using it along side standard political sloganeering to lawfully oppose policies that they don't agree with.
It's so obvious...you're going to get screwed. One could argue you've already been screwed. There is no such thing as "rock solid job security", especially 6-8 years of it.
I'll agree it's selective, but I don't know how illogical it is. The fact is that any recent glaring examples of this kind of rhetoric have come from the right. I've heard reference to Obama's "they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun" once or twice, and heard (although can't find) reference to a left wing poster from 2004 that apparently used gunsights in a fashion similar to Palin's.
I purposely left out any mention of names or parties in my post as I think it is largely besides the point.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very true, if it is ultra-high traffic code I wouldn't use regular expressions for much, although you can improve performance a bit (even in the above example) by pre-compiling the pattern and using a static reference to it. How many times though do you run across terrible abuses of chained/nested substring calls (usually without bounds checking) to accomplish things like the above? This is just one area where regex is a godsend.
I know you're joking (and it's funny), but I'm inclined to jump to the defense of using regex to solve problems - take this example:
Requirement: Long URLs must have a slash between the domain and the path component. For example, http://example.com?query=parameter is invalid, and instead should be formatted as http://example.com/?query=parameter
I challenge you to find a non-regex solution as nice as this:
url = url.replaceFirst('(://[^/]*)\\?','$1/?');
Java, in this case - but that's another beauty - you could implement the same pattern in any language that supports regex. I love it...I do love it so.
Wow, thank you. I should have been a little more diligent in my googling on this topic, or at the very least posted something about it on slashdot earlier :)
In all of the links to various attempts at modeling "simple" brains that I've been given it becomes clear that even the most rudimentary of brains requires an incredible amount of time and effort - in addition to massive amounts of storage space. I still believe that this path is the one that will eventually lead us to true AI and an understanding of human consciousness, albeit not for another hundred years or so.
Thanks for both of your replies - interesting stuff. Someone else posted this link in reply, it goes into pretty fine grained detail about efforts to model a fruit fly brain, pretty fascinating. The article points out that in addition to the extreme complexity of the actual connections, it is even more complex in that "firings" of the neurons aren't simple on/off firings, they can each fire at at different percentages. It also goes into the storage space required to store what they find - it's staggering.
Indeed I've never heard of it - thanks for the link!
I'd go from there to an ant brain. Maybe a mosquito is even too ambitious - I wonder if anyone has tried to simulate the nervous system of a sea sponge, or an earth worm...
I remember this story - the catch was that they simply (ha) set up a software brain simulation which had enough numbers of neurons and synapses (from the article: 760 million, 6 trillion, respectively) to put it above cat-scale, but as far as I can tell no actual attempt was made to virtually render a living brain in a computer.
:)
The brain of an ant contains a mere 250K neurons, seems like it would be a cake walk after the cat-scale exercise
More animal neuron counts
If I could go back and do it all over again I think I would spend my entire life trying to figure out how a mosquito's brain works. There must be research along these lines happening somewhere but you never hear about it - they are always trying to map out mouse brains, or some other small mammal.
Why so ambitious? Start small - if a computer program could be made that perfectly imitates a mosquito it would be a huge breakthrough.
Agreed. I personally think that the Unix command line shell with the standard suite of commands is the apex of the software productivity vs. usability graph.
:)
Picture a bell curve, on the left extreme you have punch cards, in the middle is bash, and on the right extreme is "Angry Birds"
They conflate "different" with "hard," and call Linux "hard" because they already learned Windows and Ubuntu is different.
I see what you are getting at, but I think a point that is missed is that for a person with no interest in learning anything new about computers - a base consumer (which I am not, I'm playing devil's advocate with this thread) - whether something is "different" or "hard" makes no difference when the thing to be avoided is "effort". If windows were to cease to exist tomorrow I have no doubt that the transition would be relatively smooth because linux has evolved into a very easy platform to use, as you point out. Alas, this will not be the case and the path of least resistance will continue to be windows for the foreseeable future.
Eventually your TV/DVD/Game console will probably be doing all sorts of computer kinda stuff and you will fondly remember how you could waste several hours figuring out how to put italics into your emails. :-)
Hah! That very well may be.
To the rest of your post, my point was not that I have a desire to switch completely to ubuntu, I was only trying to establish that if I as a tech savvy user capable of such a switch find that it's too much of a hassle to do so then it would certainly be beyond the reach of the subject of the parent's anecdote. I'll probably end up converting my windows box to ubuntu/centOS and using it as my web/DB/application/file server once I snag a new personal use laptop - which will either be a macbook or a windows 7 machine, haven't decided. In any case, thanks for your reply.
Fair question on the iTunes - I didn't mean to suggest that it would have to be iTunes, only that a suitably easy analog would have to be available to give the parent's anecdote legs. Based on other responses it sounds like there are such alternatives. That said, I still just don't see Ubuntu as a viable option for the archetypical lay-person (a receptionist in this case).
However, I could see going Ubuntu as the first step on a path that ends with the person buying the boxed windows OS and having a perfectly clean machine, ironically.
Not trolling...I guess I've always referred to a non-windows machine as an "OS box" (e.g. "linux box", "solaris box"). Anyway, thanks for the response - you've confirmed my suspicion that to accomplish these things there would indeed be some faffing involved, albeit not a huge amount for the tech savvy.
I'm not trying to bust you on this, I am genuinely interested in how easy it would be for this subject to:
.docx format
* Purchase + install a webcam and use skype
* Open, modify, save, and email a recipe sent in
* Sync an iPod/iPad to an installation of iTunes
* Play music through a home stereo system (ala Apple AirPort Express)
These are things that I have had to do recently or do every day with my PC. I am 10+ year software developer, I have an ancient SUSE linux box for serving files, a macbook, a PC desktop, and a Windows work laptop. I also have a job from hell, and a 19-month old daughter which leaves no time or desire to faff around with getting these things to work on Ubuntu - unless you tell me that it is exactly as easy as it is on a PC. If this is the case for me, I am guessing it is at least the case for the woman in your example.
BTW - please excuse the formatting, ever since the UI change I can't properly format my comments, and the FAQ has not been updated.
As I see it the only reason this practice is unethical (and I agree it is) is that the normal rules of the "fair" market are being subverted because the countries we offshore these jobs to do not have to abide by all of the environmental/human rights guidelines that we do (rightly, I believe), and can therefore run cheaper, and charge less. Because it is not illegal, as you point out, the free market insists on offshoring these jobs - it is so much cheaper to send these jobs offshore (at the very least 1:2 in the skilled IT market) that a hit on the quality side is acceptable.
As a result one would think that a solution to this problem would be to impose restrictions on our corporations as to which countries they can hire people in, based on the environmental laws and labor laws of the target country. I am assuming that you as a conservative view this as the government imposing morals and undue regulation on the free market. If I am correct in this assumption can you explain the contradiction?
I think you mean "intnerns"
Nothing to ski here.
Sorry...seriously though, this sounds like a great idea.
comments in nested comments nested in comments
This is to see if the text will bunch up after a lot of levels of replies because it used to be an annoying bug and it would be nice to see if it went away by now so please reply to this and try to make the sentence long so we can see if it bunches up.
This is a tired argument, and I have to agree with Americano's assessment on this one.
The simple fact is that college is the most convenient and obvious place to learn about whatever it is you are interested in learning about after high school - regardless of the implications towards employment. If you feel less bovine by sitting in a library and teaching yourself everything you are interested in learning then have at it. To brand (sorry) people that do choose to learn in a university as cattle stinks of jealousy and resentment on your part.
I think Ben Franklin put it best: "Learn of the skillful; he that teaches himself, has a fool for his master."
I had the same thought as RJHelms below - the paper (PDF) is great, but I do think it was meant only as a proof of concept/warning. I guess this is how rumors get started...
Well, you certainly have a point. Free speech in this country is under constant threat from every direction (I've seen mention of the "fairness doctrine" in response to Tucson, for instance). I do however believe that responding to these threats using language that implies a willingness or intention to commit acts of violence only serves to make them stronger.
Your fears are unfounded. The "right to rebel", or "right to revolution" is not something that can be revoked by the government, it's not like there's an amendment to the constitution that gives us the right to rise in an armed rebellion against the government (I'm aware that this is 2nd amendment bait...please refrain) It's a philosophical concept that every citizen of every government must define for themselves.
My argument is not to abolish the possibility of violent rhetoric for all time (an unattainable goal), rather it is for the current set of politicians to realize that such rhetoric is very serious, and should be reserved for those who have actual intention of rising up and causing death and destruction such as what we saw in Tuscon - as opposed to those using it along side standard political sloganeering to lawfully oppose policies that they don't agree with.
It's so obvious...you're going to get screwed. One could argue you've already been screwed. There is no such thing as "rock solid job security", especially 6-8 years of it.
I'll agree it's selective, but I don't know how illogical it is. The fact is that any recent glaring examples of this kind of rhetoric have come from the right. I've heard reference to Obama's "they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun" once or twice, and heard (although can't find) reference to a left wing poster from 2004 that apparently used gunsights in a fashion similar to Palin's.
I purposely left out any mention of names or parties in my post as I think it is largely besides the point.