Didn't he take down a vibrant wiki that had been hosted describing the universe of one of his earlier projects, to make way for a sterile marketing page for one of his newer ones? Or am I thinking of someone else?
Have I walked into some sort of alternative reality where nerds are posting that the skill of reading is archaic? And that only a "small number of professional historians" need to do it?
The way you're defining it, yes. I might as well define "reading" to mean "reading hieroglyphics", and at that point I imagine you'd agree with the statement.
Sure, the ability to read means more than being able to recognise one particular font, but the forms have diverged far enough that you can be perfectly capable of reading modern printed English without being able to read 16th century handwriting. And while the former skill is vital, the latter is - yes, archaic. It's an interesting skill, but not one that everyone needs.
It turns out that the different notations reflected two different ways of looking at the calculus which in turn reflected two different ways of looking at mathematics, the battle between which has been a significant part of mathematical development since.
I think you're reading too much into it. They were just the notations two people happened to choose, and because of historical factors both saw some use. If you want to learn about the history of a mathematical idea, you'd do better to read a book on the subject than try to derive it from the choices of notation in the early manuscripts.
The rules of the universe aren't against it. We know this because we could get there now if the political will was there - a generation ship using nuclear pulse propulsion could comfortably sustain 0.1c, at which point we could colonise the galaxy in maybe 200 million years.
So, are you offering to do the typing out? I agree that it's harder to read old handwritten works than their typeset equivalents, if the typesetting is good, but I consider being able to read a useful skill
Reading original manuscripts is a useful skill, sure, but it's not one that everyone needs. Just like not everyone needs to be able to be able to do their own plumbing, or fix their own car. We need a small number of professional historians who can read original documents, but it's a waste of time to teach it to absolutely everyone during school.
This also is often wrong. The development of notation is an incredibly important part of the development of mathematics, and you'll probably become a better mathematician by understanding how notation evolved and bounced between descriptions, words, word-like squiggles, discrete symbols and diagrams.
That's simply not true - look at the history of the calculus. For over a century you had the quite different Newtonian and Leibnitzian notations - but turns out (of course) you do exactly the same calculations in either, and can translate any given proof back and forth. Even though the Newtonian notation is a bit clumsier (which is why it has now died out), it was perfectly adequate and any number of theorems were proved using it.
the student also needs to learn what's really going on inside the box, and that level is a lot easier for most people to get started with than a bunch of abstractions
Disagree; the place that's easiest to get started is the place where programs are clearest; the hello world should simply be 'print "hello world"' or similar. You and I know that a linked list is more abstract than an array, but someone who's just starting to program sees two things that act the same, just they have to manually faff with the size of one of them.
You're getting into trouble because you're trying to write C in python. If you want to twiddle array elements then sure, C's a more appropriate language for that. But when you're writing python properly you practically never use variables, and not having to explicitly allocate and deallocate your memory makes it much clearer what the actual program is doing.
Not if that guy spent his time learning about algorithms on a more abstract level, and can spot where the program's doing something O(n^2) when it could be doing something O(n).
You seem to believe a school should teach C rather than teaching programming. Teaching programming is easier in a higher level language without the tedious business of manual memory management getting in the way.
That's a perfect example of how accusations stick even after they've emerged to be false. No evidence was ever found of genocide in Kosovo by the government forces - only by the KLA, the guys who the US was fighting alongside.
In the 2.4 days I would've agreed with you, but in recent years I've found linux just gets crashier and crashier. I've now switched to freebsd and it's much better.
What makes you so sure? Gaming companies certainly do ship game+emulator from time to time, e.g. some of the early square games on playstation are just snes emulator + snes rom on the disc.
(Of course, provided they're willing to support it it doesn't really matter. To a certain extent anything not written in hand-coded assembler is running on an emulator, and on modern processors, even that is)
My family took the sleeper autotrain from Frankfurt or thereabouts to Verona one year, it was wonderful. Nice dinner, comfortable beds, through the Alps by night, breakfast in the morning and you're there, fresh and with your car. But that service only runs about twice a week.
How so? It's a multitasking OS that I can develop software for, for free, and distribute on the internet without needing to pay anyone anything - just download the.cab and run it. It can play every video I've come across, it'll run a decent IRC client, and there are emulators for game systems I've never even heard of. And it was doing all this in '03. What've you got as an alternative in that space?
2. STOP DEPENDING ON 3 MAGIC LETTERS TO DETERMINE IF SOMETHING IS CODE OR DATA. COME ON, SERIOUSLY. THIS SHOULD HAVE DIED WITH CP/M.
Doesn't make any difference. Bottom line, people need to be able to edit code as data, and switch which of the two it is; whichever way you do that it's usable.
3. Kill ActiveX - I know of no legitimate website besides Microsoft.com that requires ActiveX.
Makes no difference given that people continue to want to let websites run code on their machines. Flash or firefox plugins or whatever are no more secure than ActiveX.
4. If a file comes in from the outside world - STRIP ITS PERMISSION TO EXECUTE. MAKE THE USER UNPACK IT FROM AN ARCHIVE OR SET ITS PERMISSION.
This would make no difference at all. So it takes one more click to execute something. That's not going to stop anyone. It's just going to piss me off more when I actually want to execute some code.
I'm guessing that by better quality they mean materialistically.
Because the US couldn't possibly be worse off in any other regard? As a European I can come home and get better working hours, and far better holiday allowance. I can live somewhere with trees and grass but my commute is a 15-minute cycle. There's less fear of crime (and while I'm not sure how much people's fears are grounded in reality, I do believe crime rates are lower), we've got a rail network that actually works, and I'm sure I don't need to go on about free healthcare and education. And for people going back where they came from, just being able to live with their families can be worth a lot.
There are many good things about the USA, but it's a mistake to think it's impossible to have anywhere better.
This is an immensely useful project - it makes it possible to write the client-side code for web apps in python, increasing the efficiency of doing so massively, and so helps make the web better for everyone.
The much-maligned GIL was a performance solution to the time - it made the interpreter run faster on uniprocessors than individual locks around each part. When the average python-running machine has >2 cores I suspect we'll see the back of it - but that won't be for a while yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't he take down a vibrant wiki that had been hosted describing the universe of one of his earlier projects, to make way for a sterile marketing page for one of his newer ones? Or am I thinking of someone else?
The way you're defining it, yes. I might as well define "reading" to mean "reading hieroglyphics", and at that point I imagine you'd agree with the statement.
Sure, the ability to read means more than being able to recognise one particular font, but the forms have diverged far enough that you can be perfectly capable of reading modern printed English without being able to read 16th century handwriting. And while the former skill is vital, the latter is - yes, archaic. It's an interesting skill, but not one that everyone needs.
It turns out that the different notations reflected two different ways of looking at the calculus which in turn reflected two different ways of looking at mathematics, the battle between which has been a significant part of mathematical development since.
I think you're reading too much into it. They were just the notations two people happened to choose, and because of historical factors both saw some use. If you want to learn about the history of a mathematical idea, you'd do better to read a book on the subject than try to derive it from the choices of notation in the early manuscripts.
The rules of the universe aren't against it. We know this because we could get there now if the political will was there - a generation ship using nuclear pulse propulsion could comfortably sustain 0.1c, at which point we could colonise the galaxy in maybe 200 million years.
Reading original manuscripts is a useful skill, sure, but it's not one that everyone needs. Just like not everyone needs to be able to be able to do their own plumbing, or fix their own car. We need a small number of professional historians who can read original documents, but it's a waste of time to teach it to absolutely everyone during school.
This also is often wrong. The development of notation is an incredibly important part of the development of mathematics, and you'll probably become a better mathematician by understanding how notation evolved and bounced between descriptions, words, word-like squiggles, discrete symbols and diagrams.
That's simply not true - look at the history of the calculus. For over a century you had the quite different Newtonian and Leibnitzian notations - but turns out (of course) you do exactly the same calculations in either, and can translate any given proof back and forth. Even though the Newtonian notation is a bit clumsier (which is why it has now died out), it was perfectly adequate and any number of theorems were proved using it.
the student also needs to learn what's really going on inside the box, and that level is a lot easier for most people to get started with than a bunch of abstractions
Disagree; the place that's easiest to get started is the place where programs are clearest; the hello world should simply be 'print "hello world"' or similar. You and I know that a linked list is more abstract than an array, but someone who's just starting to program sees two things that act the same, just they have to manually faff with the size of one of them.
It surprises me, considering how slow sneakernet is compared to the internet.
You're getting into trouble because you're trying to write C in python. If you want to twiddle array elements then sure, C's a more appropriate language for that. But when you're writing python properly you practically never use variables, and not having to explicitly allocate and deallocate your memory makes it much clearer what the actual program is doing.
Not if that guy spent his time learning about algorithms on a more abstract level, and can spot where the program's doing something O(n^2) when it could be doing something O(n).
You seem to believe a school should teach C rather than teaching programming. Teaching programming is easier in a higher level language without the tedious business of manual memory management getting in the way.
That's a perfect example of how accusations stick even after they've emerged to be false. No evidence was ever found of genocide in Kosovo by the government forces - only by the KLA, the guys who the US was fighting alongside.
Sure, but all those are just engineering challenges. None are insurmountable.
In the 2.4 days I would've agreed with you, but in recent years I've found linux just gets crashier and crashier. I've now switched to freebsd and it's much better.
Yeah, except that PulseAudio broke OpenAL apps. And no doubt the next pointless crappy rewrite of the linux sound layer will do so too.
(Of course, provided they're willing to support it it doesn't really matter. To a certain extent anything not written in hand-coded assembler is running on an emulator, and on modern processors, even that is)
My family took the sleeper autotrain from Frankfurt or thereabouts to Verona one year, it was wonderful. Nice dinner, comfortable beds, through the Alps by night, breakfast in the morning and you're there, fresh and with your car. But that service only runs about twice a week.
With a security bug, there are benefits to keeping it secret until it's fixed, which is why many organizations will treat them differently.
It's only obvious if you care enough about archaic measurement systems to know
This was one of many pleasant surprises when I switched from linux to freebsd - they've stuck with OSS, and it all works beautifully.
How so? It's a multitasking OS that I can develop software for, for free, and distribute on the internet without needing to pay anyone anything - just download the .cab and run it. It can play every video I've come across, it'll run a decent IRC client, and there are emulators for game systems I've never even heard of. And it was doing all this in '03. What've you got as an alternative in that space?
2. STOP DEPENDING ON 3 MAGIC LETTERS TO DETERMINE IF SOMETHING IS CODE OR DATA. COME ON, SERIOUSLY. THIS SHOULD HAVE DIED WITH CP/M.
Doesn't make any difference. Bottom line, people need to be able to edit code as data, and switch which of the two it is; whichever way you do that it's usable.
3. Kill ActiveX - I know of no legitimate website besides Microsoft.com that requires ActiveX.
Makes no difference given that people continue to want to let websites run code on their machines. Flash or firefox plugins or whatever are no more secure than ActiveX.
4. If a file comes in from the outside world - STRIP ITS PERMISSION TO EXECUTE. MAKE THE USER UNPACK IT FROM AN ARCHIVE OR SET ITS PERMISSION.
This would make no difference at all. So it takes one more click to execute something. That's not going to stop anyone. It's just going to piss me off more when I actually want to execute some code.
This means IBM will be able to stop people using it.
I'm guessing that by better quality they mean materialistically.
Because the US couldn't possibly be worse off in any other regard? As a European I can come home and get better working hours, and far better holiday allowance. I can live somewhere with trees and grass but my commute is a 15-minute cycle. There's less fear of crime (and while I'm not sure how much people's fears are grounded in reality, I do believe crime rates are lower), we've got a rail network that actually works, and I'm sure I don't need to go on about free healthcare and education. And for people going back where they came from, just being able to live with their families can be worth a lot.
There are many good things about the USA, but it's a mistake to think it's impossible to have anywhere better.
I doubt that would make so much difference, if you painted one of these in thermite it would go up just as badly.
This is an immensely useful project - it makes it possible to write the client-side code for web apps in python, increasing the efficiency of doing so massively, and so helps make the web better for everyone.
The much-maligned GIL was a performance solution to the time - it made the interpreter run faster on uniprocessors than individual locks around each part. When the average python-running machine has >2 cores I suspect we'll see the back of it - but that won't be for a while yet.