Everyone who has replied to you has missed one thing: the original version of Pascal, which was designed as a teaching language, and all the versions of Turbo Pascal I used, treated the size of an array as part of the type. Think about that for a minute. An array of size 10 was a different type from an array of size 20, even when the objects stored at each index were of the same type. So... try writing a sort function in a generic way. You can't. Lots of library functions cannot be written with standard Pascal. Of course, this was eventually changed, but there was no spokesperson for the language since the original author had NOT intended it for real use. Thus, there were lots of versions of Pascal, and most of them still had this trouble. That is one of the reasons Pascal died: people could not write library functions easily. As opposed to C, where it is very, very easy.
Hell yeah. I learned the same languages in that order when I was in grade school and high school.
BASIC: self-taught including line numbers and even *shudder* edlin once one a random computer in elementary school, plus a year of high school. A wonderful language to learn with.
Pascal: a dead language. Why the hell are people still using it? Whatever, I learned it in two years of high school, learned about pointers and trees and ADTs. Since it was DESIGNED as an educational language, NOT as an industrial language, it was great to learn with.
C/C++: should die, except for programming kernels and hardware libraries. But I learned some of it in the last year of high school, and more in college. Great language for low-level manipulation and byte-counting accuracy (that's C only, not C++).
They're trying to teach my brother basic computer science at UT Dallas by using Java. And not just Java, but Swing. It is a wondefully powerful language, just like C, and it has native threading, exceptions, and class extensions, so it blows C++ out of the water. But it is a horrible language with which to teach computer science. Horrible, horrible, horrible, even more so than C. My brother didn't know what a 'class' was, and they wanted him to use Java! Give me a break, and him, too.
Once I got to college, I learned Haskell, then Python, PHP, a little JAVA, LISP, and assembly (okay, assembly for a simple machine). Haskell kicked my ass. Want to know why? Because I already 'knew' how to program. What I 'knew' was the suspension of disbelief required for working in the imperative programming world. Haskell is a great language for teaching people who do NOT know programming at all. My suggestion: start with Haskell, then move to Python (which is like BASIC in that it is interpreted and has a sparse syntax).
Why do we have to make it hard on people during education? We should use Haskell, Python, Pascal, or BASIC in order to teach them. And why do we have to make it hard on ourselves as programmers? We should not use Pascal or BASIC for anything, and we should use other languages for what they are good for.
And what is C good for? Explicit control and direction. Pascal? Nothing in the industry. If you're going non-standard (i.e. not C/C++), and you need absolutely enforced types, then byte the bullet and learn Haskell. Here, I'll make it easy for you: I've actually written a tutorial about Haskell for people who know languages like C (including Pascal, Perl, Python, PHP, etc.). If you know any of those languages, and you want to learn a better, simpler, more free way , please check it out. I made it just for you, really! Oh, just so I mention it, it's fairly easy to call external code from Haskell, so you can still be naughty if you need to.
Simply put, it could be a bad thing if there's not enough money to make good (big budget) shows. Lots of money to pay for production comes from advertising. I really wish I knew how much. If the distributor can't prove to the advertisers that the show is watched, or there aren't ads at all, etc., etc., then the only money for shows will come from viewers' dues. If that only covers bandwidth costs and licenses, then they'll only be able to pay for shows that have been made. They won't be able to front the money for production costs ahead of time as the major networks currently do. So... no production strength without strong advertising revenue. Or something. 'Something' could be another deep-pockets company, but than again, those companies already own pieces of the current infrastructure, with which this project would compete. So, nobody big is going to buy into this, unless we get lucky.
That doesn't really, work, though. Changing to a more efficient power supply will alter MIPS/Watt. Also, the MIPS rating of a processor is now a difficult number to calculate, because different utilization can drastically alter the actual number of instructions completed during a given unit time.
For instance, running hardware-intensive software, such as a network application server, causes a lot of hardware interrupts from the hard drive and the network card that the system has to service. These require a lot of context switches, such as from application to OS to handle the hardware request, then back to application, then to the application's exception handler so that it can deal with the new information as well. On modern processors, context switches mean losing partially-completed instructions.
On the other hand, scientific computing has a lot of pure computation, with few branches and very few system requests. There are few context switches and as a result, the total number of instructions completed is very high.
So, MIPS is not used much anymore. And Watt usage varies depending on external factors. I guess I'm done here.
What would it matter if they stood up? They'd just be voted out of office next time around and replaced with the people they oppose. Too much money is being thrown around for a voice or a thought to matter.
I have one major suggested change for you: Comment your thoughts. If you spend half a day or more figuring out how to solve a problem, then your solution AND the thought process that let you get there belong as comments. This can be several pages. If you do this, you will never repeat mental work, and anyone (including you) reading your code will have one hell of a guide. Also, when there is a ton of code, comments are a guide. You did a lot of work just deciding on the organization of the code, so document that with comments too.
Basically, I write down anything that I don't want to have to figure out again. It saves me so much time with large projects. You have to keep this level of agressiveness up to keep the comments up to date, but if you get used to putting your thought processes on paper, then you'll get used to editting them on paper, too.
The entire objection to this law is that "reasonable cause" is no longer important, since ISPs would be forced to turn over the names of people who were violating laws. This is different from the current situation, where due process is required against offenders. That's why this is a violation of privacy. It removes the due process part of an investigation. Oh, IANAL.
I hope to high heaven that you are not a programmer. And if you can't figure out what I mean, then... okay, fine, I'll tell you. I mean that not having checks is always worse than having checks, no matter what.
You don't. Your kids will pick what they want to be interested in as a natural result of what they do in life.
I'm not really sure about that. My first real experience with programming was when I came across a book about programming simple games in QBASIC. I was in a library, not my house. If my parents hadn't at least helped me get to the library and wander around, I wouldn't have been interested in much of anything. My real talent with computers is program design, and that takes a long time to develop. If my parents and teachers hadn't given me access to books and a lot of direction, I would never have been able to sort things out. Things might be a little different now that the internet is available, but of course you'd have to train your kids for that now, too.
It would be good to avoid any enemies sniffing all the messages that look like this: "It's late, and I love you. Pray for me; we're going into action tomorrow." Enough messages sniffed like that, possibly with IP addresses attached, and an enemy force might be more prepared than the military might like.
There are animals worth $50,000. Race horses in particular. This commercial venture will quickly expand to more realistic (but larger) targets once the technology has been proven. Extremely rich people are a good way to do that, because the nuance will attract a small number of customers. However, most technologies need to target a slightly broader audience, and this one has many applications that can make some sense, at least monetarily.
Very, very funny. I always loved how the flexibility of text muds allowed such complicated chicanery. But in FPS MUDs, including the new World of Warcraft, retribution is difficult to achieve, or at least I think it is. I would suggest that the only MUDs which will overcome this issue are those that allow creative manipulation of the envirnment, and also have full player participation in a closed economy. Only then would players be able to affect each other. Just a guess, though.
Did the use of software patent keep us from developing useful web apps in the mid-to-late nineties? Is that why some ideas never took off? I'd like to know if we already have the 'shot self in foot' kind of history.
Man, I don't know. I think I'd rather have women that can make it all the way to me. It's so silly when someone in high heels trips, you know? If they were wearing combat boots and watching their step, we wouldn't have this problem.
You're out of touch here. As a whole, games are not just for fun, and never have been, ever, in the history of the world.
First, pantomime combat replaces actual combat, which does several things:
1. It lets us act out history and culture. Examples: A. pantomime combat is used in most religions, including Christian (ex: Jesus is tempted by Satan where the combat is intellectual, Jesus rises from the dead is God vs. nature, Jesus on a cross celebrates brutality and indicates that proper response to such is part of the religion's teachings) B. Historical and fantasy reenactment groups let people participate in history and culture. The SCA and other, more fantasy-oriented groups let people watch and participate in 'new history' as well as old, identifying their culture. And other groups consistently reenact specific battles, particularly those of major American wars.
2. It allows us to hone our instincts and skills without as much risk. Examples: A. Counter-Strike will train your hand-eye coordination. B. 'Fake' hunting games have been used forever to train children, and all major sports strive for safety while encouraging participants to improve themselves. C. Old-style manual dexterity toys (ball and cup attached by string, jump rope, rail walking) do encourage real manual dexterity in children, and provide a training ground that otherwise would not exist. D. DDR gets slacker high school kids to work out. E. It's widely known, but it does bear mentioning that one of the biggest pushes for early video game technology, especially graphics, came from the US military. F. Tetris
Second, intellectual puzzles prepare us for greater real puzzles. This means:
1. Children can be brought up to speed on the challenges that have been faced and conquered before. We turn those into puzzles, riddles, and video games. Examples: A. Crosswords B. Logic puzzles (both fully abstract, like those in The Looking Glass and lateral-thinking puzzles, and concrete, like Mensa math and word challenges) C. Minesweeper D. Legos E. SimCity
2. People of all ages can play games to keep their intellect sharp. All of the above examples apply, but the following are famous for this: A. Chess B. Go C. Fencing D. Martial Arts E. Programming F. Flight simulators G. Tetris (yes, it belongs here, too)
Third, in addition to video games reinforcing our culture, the idea of video games themselves is now a part of our culture. We (and our children, forever) will identify with video games. We dress up as their characters, we learn morals and jokes from them, and we are affected as a society by their art more than we know.
These things together mean that honoring specific video games is appropriate, specifically those that reached us, affected us, and stayed with us. And that's all I've got to say about that.
If you read the posts for the story about disabling your mail server, you'll see that that action was probably not what caused their slowdown in spam mail.
Dude, we covered this in class, for crying out loud. Let's see, how did it go?
Given: a series of things which have some rating, and that you can only view one at a time, and when viewing one you can either discard it and move on or accept it and stop.
Question: What strategy will let have the highest possible expected value of the item you pick?
Answer:
You need to know the total number, say N.
View and discard ln N items, recording the highest value among them.
Then view the remaining items and stop at the first item with a higher value than the highest among the 'preview' group.
This gives a very good expected value (don't have my book handy for the exact value, Intro to Algorithms, Cormen et al), and even more, it gives a 1/e (one over e) chance of actually picking the highest value item in the group.
So...
There are six billion people in the world in counting. Let's narrow that down to maybe 1 million people whom you could communicate with and would really consider as viable options.
N = 10 ^ 6
ln N = 13.8...
Therefore you should date 14 random viable people and leave them all, then go after random viable people and take the first person you find that's better than the first 14. If that special someone was in the first 14... what the hell are you doing? You've still got their phone number or e-mail address, right? Weirdo.
Since your sig is on-topic, I'll just say that there is no way that IE is that much fun. It would need to come with at least three free drunken frats/sorors to compete.
I would very much like to know if the instructions in the first response worked for you. A friend of mine gave me one of her locked files once because I said I'd try to crack it for her. No luck yet.
But if they (the FBI or equivalent) obtained a copyright for said mechanisms, then it would be publicly viewable, giving away the very information they wish to conceal.
You know what, let's not deforest areas in order to build wind turbines. Let's build pre-fab turbines that lock into place in a large grid with poles that stretch above the trees. Heck, I think I'll draw that now.
And now that I think about that, this can be used to preserve forests by holding their edges in place.
Well, it wasn't my post, but I'm just suggesting that if Walmart is listed as the major commercial player, then US leaders could easily have been implied, just as much as Chinese. Anyway...
I appreciate you posting your perspective. The question that has always been raised about Chinese communism is whether or not it is appropriate for a government to hinder the power of its citizens to educate themselves. The only groups throughout history that have hidden information from the public have been those that had something to fear from the people.
By selectively cutting off the Chinese people from a certain class of information, your government has robbed you of the chance to decide for yourself about the issues to which that information relates. The only justifications for such behavior are those that equate to, "We do this for your own good." But this blocking of information does not extend only to children, but to adults and the elderly.
You may feel that this theft of your ability to think is acceptable. But consider your family, your friends, and the students in schools and colleges. ("Think of the children.") China is a developing country, and will face great challenges. Can you clearly say that your own county will benefit by preventing every one of those people from considering various points of view? Your people will be intellectually hampered. When China needs new leaders to handle new issues, your entire populace will have blindspots in their vision, and none of you will be fully prepared.
In an ironic and very sad twist, this will further China's dependence on foreigners. Can you live with all of this? Can you deny your own family the chance to see new possibilities?
That is the problem we see in China. If you cut off part of your field of view, you can no longer judge those who have it. This breeds a country which can say nothing about the outside world. Are you sure that you are 100% okay with letting that happen to you?
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone who has replied to you has missed one thing: the original version of Pascal, which was designed as a teaching language, and all the versions of Turbo Pascal I used, treated the size of an array as part of the type. Think about that for a minute. An array of size 10 was a different type from an array of size 20, even when the objects stored at each index were of the same type. So... try writing a sort function in a generic way. You can't. Lots of library functions cannot be written with standard Pascal. Of course, this was eventually changed, but there was no spokesperson for the language since the original author had NOT intended it for real use. Thus, there were lots of versions of Pascal, and most of them still had this trouble. That is one of the reasons Pascal died: people could not write library functions easily. As opposed to C, where it is very, very easy.
BASIC: self-taught including line numbers and even *shudder* edlin once one a random computer in elementary school, plus a year of high school. A wonderful language to learn with.
Pascal: a dead language. Why the hell are people still using it? Whatever, I learned it in two years of high school, learned about pointers and trees and ADTs. Since it was DESIGNED as an educational language, NOT as an industrial language, it was great to learn with.
C/C++: should die, except for programming kernels and hardware libraries. But I learned some of it in the last year of high school, and more in college. Great language for low-level manipulation and byte-counting accuracy (that's C only, not C++).
They're trying to teach my brother basic computer science at UT Dallas by using Java. And not just Java, but Swing. It is a wondefully powerful language, just like C, and it has native threading, exceptions, and class extensions, so it blows C++ out of the water. But it is a horrible language with which to teach computer science. Horrible, horrible, horrible, even more so than C. My brother didn't know what a 'class' was, and they wanted him to use Java! Give me a break, and him, too.
Once I got to college, I learned Haskell, then Python, PHP, a little JAVA, LISP, and assembly (okay, assembly for a simple machine). Haskell kicked my ass. Want to know why? Because I already 'knew' how to program. What I 'knew' was the suspension of disbelief required for working in the imperative programming world. Haskell is a great language for teaching people who do NOT know programming at all. My suggestion: start with Haskell, then move to Python (which is like BASIC in that it is interpreted and has a sparse syntax).
Why do we have to make it hard on people during education? We should use Haskell, Python, Pascal, or BASIC in order to teach them. And why do we have to make it hard on ourselves as programmers? We should not use Pascal or BASIC for anything, and we should use other languages for what they are good for.
And what is C good for? Explicit control and direction. Pascal? Nothing in the industry. If you're going non-standard (i.e. not C/C++), and you need absolutely enforced types, then byte the bullet and learn Haskell. Here, I'll make it easy for you: I've actually written a tutorial about Haskell for people who know languages like C (including Pascal, Perl, Python, PHP, etc.). If you know any of those languages, and you want to learn a better, simpler, more free way , please check it out. I made it just for you, really! Oh, just so I mention it, it's fairly easy to call external code from Haskell, so you can still be naughty if you need to.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane.
Simply put, it could be a bad thing if there's not enough money to make good (big budget) shows. Lots of money to pay for production comes from advertising. I really wish I knew how much. If the distributor can't prove to the advertisers that the show is watched, or there aren't ads at all, etc., etc., then the only money for shows will come from viewers' dues. If that only covers bandwidth costs and licenses, then they'll only be able to pay for shows that have been made. They won't be able to front the money for production costs ahead of time as the major networks currently do. So... no production strength without strong advertising revenue. Or something. 'Something' could be another deep-pockets company, but than again, those companies already own pieces of the current infrastructure, with which this project would compete. So, nobody big is going to buy into this, unless we get lucky.
That doesn't really, work, though. Changing to a more efficient power supply will alter MIPS/Watt. Also, the MIPS rating of a processor is now a difficult number to calculate, because different utilization can drastically alter the actual number of instructions completed during a given unit time.
For instance, running hardware-intensive software, such as a network application server, causes a lot of hardware interrupts from the hard drive and the network card that the system has to service. These require a lot of context switches, such as from application to OS to handle the hardware request, then back to application, then to the application's exception handler so that it can deal with the new information as well. On modern processors, context switches mean losing partially-completed instructions.
On the other hand, scientific computing has a lot of pure computation, with few branches and very few system requests. There are few context switches and as a result, the total number of instructions completed is very high.
So, MIPS is not used much anymore. And Watt usage varies depending on external factors. I guess I'm done here.
Quit giving people suggestions!
What would it matter if they stood up? They'd just be voted out of office next time around and replaced with the people they oppose. Too much money is being thrown around for a voice or a thought to matter.
I have one major suggested change for you: Comment your thoughts. If you spend half a day or more figuring out how to solve a problem, then your solution AND the thought process that let you get there belong as comments. This can be several pages. If you do this, you will never repeat mental work, and anyone (including you) reading your code will have one hell of a guide. Also, when there is a ton of code, comments are a guide. You did a lot of work just deciding on the organization of the code, so document that with comments too.
Basically, I write down anything that I don't want to have to figure out again. It saves me so much time with large projects. You have to keep this level of agressiveness up to keep the comments up to date, but if you get used to putting your thought processes on paper, then you'll get used to editting them on paper, too.
The entire objection to this law is that "reasonable cause" is no longer important, since ISPs would be forced to turn over the names of people who were violating laws. This is different from the current situation, where due process is required against offenders. That's why this is a violation of privacy. It removes the due process part of an investigation. Oh, IANAL.
I hope to high heaven that you are not a programmer. And if you can't figure out what I mean, then... okay, fine, I'll tell you. I mean that not having checks is always worse than having checks, no matter what.
I'm not really sure about that. My first real experience with programming was when I came across a book about programming simple games in QBASIC. I was in a library, not my house. If my parents hadn't at least helped me get to the library and wander around, I wouldn't have been interested in much of anything. My real talent with computers is program design, and that takes a long time to develop. If my parents and teachers hadn't given me access to books and a lot of direction, I would never have been able to sort things out. Things might be a little different now that the internet is available, but of course you'd have to train your kids for that now, too.
It would be good to avoid any enemies sniffing all the messages that look like this: "It's late, and I love you. Pray for me; we're going into action tomorrow." Enough messages sniffed like that, possibly with IP addresses attached, and an enemy force might be more prepared than the military might like.
There are animals worth $50,000. Race horses in particular. This commercial venture will quickly expand to more realistic (but larger) targets once the technology has been proven. Extremely rich people are a good way to do that, because the nuance will attract a small number of customers. However, most technologies need to target a slightly broader audience, and this one has many applications that can make some sense, at least monetarily.
Very, very funny. I always loved how the flexibility of text muds allowed such complicated chicanery. But in FPS MUDs, including the new World of Warcraft, retribution is difficult to achieve, or at least I think it is. I would suggest that the only MUDs which will overcome this issue are those that allow creative manipulation of the envirnment, and also have full player participation in a closed economy. Only then would players be able to affect each other. Just a guess, though.
But if you did that, you might not get any recognition for your hard work.
Did the use of software patent keep us from developing useful web apps in the mid-to-late nineties? Is that why some ideas never took off? I'd like to know if we already have the 'shot self in foot' kind of history.
Man, I don't know. I think I'd rather have women that can make it all the way to me. It's so silly when someone in high heels trips, you know? If they were wearing combat boots and watching their step, we wouldn't have this problem.
Just messing around. Don't shoot me.
- lifeblender
You're out of touch here. As a whole, games are not just for fun, and never have been, ever, in the history of the world.
First, pantomime combat replaces actual combat, which does several things:
1. It lets us act out history and culture. Examples:
A. pantomime combat is used in most religions, including Christian (ex: Jesus is tempted by Satan where the combat is intellectual, Jesus rises from the dead is God vs. nature, Jesus on a cross celebrates brutality and indicates that proper response to such is part of the religion's teachings)
B. Historical and fantasy reenactment groups let people participate in history and culture. The SCA and other, more fantasy-oriented groups let people watch and participate in 'new history' as well as old, identifying their culture. And other groups consistently reenact specific battles, particularly those of major American wars.
2. It allows us to hone our instincts and skills without as much risk.
Examples:
A. Counter-Strike will train your hand-eye coordination.
B. 'Fake' hunting games have been used forever to train children, and all major sports strive for safety while encouraging participants to improve themselves.
C. Old-style manual dexterity toys (ball and cup attached by string, jump rope, rail walking) do encourage real manual dexterity in children, and provide a training ground that otherwise would not exist.
D. DDR gets slacker high school kids to work out.
E. It's widely known, but it does bear mentioning that one of the biggest pushes for early video game technology, especially graphics, came from the US military.
F. Tetris
Second, intellectual puzzles prepare us for greater real puzzles. This means:
1. Children can be brought up to speed on the challenges that have been faced and conquered before. We turn those into puzzles, riddles, and video games.
Examples:
A. Crosswords
B. Logic puzzles (both fully abstract, like those in The Looking Glass and lateral-thinking puzzles, and concrete, like Mensa math and word challenges)
C. Minesweeper
D. Legos
E. SimCity
2. People of all ages can play games to keep their intellect sharp. All of the above examples apply, but the following are famous for this:
A. Chess
B. Go
C. Fencing
D. Martial Arts
E. Programming
F. Flight simulators
G. Tetris (yes, it belongs here, too)
Third, in addition to video games reinforcing our culture, the idea of video games themselves is now a part of our culture. We (and our children, forever) will identify with video games. We dress up as their characters, we learn morals and jokes from them, and we are affected as a society by their art more than we know.
These things together mean that honoring specific video games is appropriate, specifically those that reached us, affected us, and stayed with us. And that's all I've got to say about that.
If you read the posts for the story about disabling your mail server, you'll see that that action was probably not what caused their slowdown in spam mail.
Given: a series of things which have some rating, and that you can only view one at a time, and when viewing one you can either discard it and move on or accept it and stop.
Question: What strategy will let have the highest possible expected value of the item you pick?
Answer:
You need to know the total number, say N.
View and discard ln N items, recording the highest value among them.
Then view the remaining items and stop at the first item with a higher value than the highest among the 'preview' group.
This gives a very good expected value (don't have my book handy for the exact value, Intro to Algorithms, Cormen et al), and even more, it gives a 1/e (one over e) chance of actually picking the highest value item in the group.
So...
There are six billion people in the world in counting. Let's narrow that down to maybe 1 million people whom you could communicate with and would really consider as viable options.
N = 10 ^ 6
ln N = 13.8...
Therefore you should date 14 random viable people and leave them all, then go after random viable people and take the first person you find that's better than the first 14. If that special someone was in the first 14... what the hell are you doing? You've still got their phone number or e-mail address, right? Weirdo.
lifeblender out
Since your sig is on-topic, I'll just say that there is no way that IE is that much fun. It would need to come with at least three free drunken frats/sorors to compete.
I would very much like to know if the instructions in the first response worked for you. A friend of mine gave me one of her locked files once because I said I'd try to crack it for her. No luck yet.
But if they (the FBI or equivalent) obtained a copyright for said mechanisms, then it would be publicly viewable, giving away the very information they wish to conceal.
You know what, let's not deforest areas in order to build wind turbines. Let's build pre-fab turbines that lock into place in a large grid with poles that stretch above the trees. Heck, I think I'll draw that now.
And now that I think about that, this can be used to preserve forests by holding their edges in place.
Well, it wasn't my post, but I'm just suggesting that if Walmart is listed as the major commercial player, then US leaders could easily have been implied, just as much as Chinese. Anyway...
I appreciate you posting your perspective. The question that has always been raised about Chinese communism is whether or not it is appropriate for a government to hinder the power of its citizens to educate themselves. The only groups throughout history that have hidden information from the public have been those that had something to fear from the people.
By selectively cutting off the Chinese people from a certain class of information, your government has robbed you of the chance to decide for yourself about the issues to which that information relates. The only justifications for such behavior are those that equate to, "We do this for your own good." But this blocking of information does not extend only to children, but to adults and the elderly.
You may feel that this theft of your ability to think is acceptable. But consider your family, your friends, and the students in schools and colleges. ("Think of the children.") China is a developing country, and will face great challenges. Can you clearly say that your own county will benefit by preventing every one of those people from considering various points of view? Your people will be intellectually hampered. When China needs new leaders to handle new issues, your entire populace will have blindspots in their vision, and none of you will be fully prepared.
In an ironic and very sad twist, this will further China's dependence on foreigners. Can you live with all of this? Can you deny your own family the chance to see new possibilities?
That is the problem we see in China. If you cut off part of your field of view, you can no longer judge those who have it. This breeds a country which can say nothing about the outside world. Are you sure that you are 100% okay with letting that happen to you?