Last time I read their help pages they hadn't had this feature yet. It's still mostly limited to handling plurals and a few other syntactic variants, however.
How To Use 32 Words To Improve Your Searches...
on
Google Raises Word Limit
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The problem with getting good search results are synonyms (different words that mean the same thing) and homonyms (the same word that means different things). With the 32 word limit, you can avoid both of these problems by following a few simple steps- Let's say, for instance, that you live in new york city and are looking for a moving company that specializes in fragile antiques... typically, the vagueness of such a query makes it hard to find good results, but not if you follow these steps:
1. Break your search into 2-4 principal, independent concepts- In my example, the concepts are NYC (the location) moving company (the company type) and antiques (the specialty)
2. For each concept, come up with as many terms as you can that are descriptions or examples of the concept that are very specific and won't trigger homonyms- For instance, you wouldn't want to use the word "New York" because it is too vague and could refer to the state (a company in Albany, NY won't help you). However, "NYC" "Long Island" "Brooklyn" "Queens" "New York City" are great, even if they seem overly specific- You just need one of them to cause a hit on a relevant page.
3. Put parenthesis around the terms for each concept (be sure to put quotes around each compound term) and OR together the items inside parentheses.
This is what the entire search might look like:
("NYC" OR "Long Island" OR "Brooklyn" OR "Queens" OR "Manhattan" OR "Bronx" OR "New York City" OR "Big Apple") ("moving company" OR "moving companies" OR "specialy movers" OR "professional movers" OR "u-haul" OR "apartment movers") ("fragile" OR "antiques" OR "china" OR "difficult to move")
It takes a bit of time to put together (and google will run slooooow because this kind of logic is very difficult for the search engine), but a search like this will give you the best possible results on hard queries.
As a medical doctor and software developer I can tell you that this is will be hard to do from several aspects. First of all, "Wiki" is unfortunately just a very whimsical name that is hard for hospital admin folks to take seriously- It just sounds like a major security risk to let something like that have access to HIPAA protected patient information- You can talk till you're blue in the face that it can be securely deployed through SSL, etc. Serious people don't do Wikis will be a knee jerk reaction that you will find hard to overcome. Maybe if they had given it a serious name like "MicroCollaborator" or something instead of Wiki, this wouldn't be a problem.
Another problem with Wikis in a hospital is that people are horribly busy and will never, ever want to take the 2 minutes it takes to learn just how convenient a Wiki system can be (Sure, you'll always have a doc or nurse who is a gadgeteer and will love to play with it, but unless everyone is aboard, Wikis aren't very useful)
Someday, Wikis or a similar technology will be on the cover of Time Magazine or somesuch and then every hospital administrator will be falling over each other trying to install Wikis... but until then, it is a hard sell, I think...
On the other hand, if your medical doctor friend is in a position where he/she can force the other residents, nurses, etc. to use the system, it could be a great asset to the practice of medicine, I think, even if people will only grudgingly participate at first- whether you use it for interdepartment communication, patient notes, etc. it could be useful for all of these.
If your friend can pull this off, he/she would be doing the kind of innovative thinking that all clinicians should be getting involved in and that will make medical care better for all of us.
Fundamentally OOP, XML, RDBMS are very different: RDBMS (relational databases) basically have no true classes, in that you can't inherit 1 table from another. XML can have class-like structures, but they are assigned to an entire document as a whole (through DTDs). OOP has true classes all the way.
Today, these technologies are like oil, water and, well, something else- The next big advances in programming, I think, will come when people learn to make these ideas come together seamlessly- People will say that they already can do this, but I think it is very clear that they don't.C-Omega is Micro$oft's starting salvo in this new technology battle.
...when we still have public funding on all this proprietary patent work? A _true_ fiscal conservative republican would funnel the country's money into development that encourages an open and competitive market place. If people want to use their own private money to gamble on patents then that's fine, but not public money!
Seems to me, we're putting money into public research that feeds private pockets in an unfair way...
Is the prez just trying to promote his religion in the guise of conservatism?
> Compared with other brain imaging techniques, fMRI has excellent spatial resolution.
True, but a neuron has has diameter of 100 microns- I'm just saying that in the popular media "brain scans" have attained a kind of mythical status about their power, and that many scientists in fields like fMRI encourage this kind of thinking (as I often see on tv or in print) when they could be more consciensous about communicating the inherent limitations.
> In any scientific experiment, you manipulate one variable and examine it's effect on some measurement
You're right, but I think that certain studies (like using transgenic mice that have certain receptors in certain brian regions deactivated) gives much clearer causative information that I would argue is qualitatively different. If other neuroscientists agree with this (and I'm not sure they do but it seems clear to me as an outsider) I wish they would emphasize these types of studies more when talking to the press instead of just showing off "pretty pictures" so much.
...but in this article, the scientists are trying to draw conclusions about how the brain functions, from a standpoint relevant to economics, by looking at fMRIs. There's nothing wrong, per se, in doing this, but I don't think brains scans are really a very good tool for determining the mechanism of brain activity in this context, or even a very good mechanism for determining the locality of brian activity. This is because:
1. fMRIs don't have very high resolution (not much less than 100 cubic millimeters per voxel) 2. They measure blood flow, which might be related to where the "thinking" in the brain is most intense, but who's to say that the "real work" isn't happening somewhere else by a smaller number of less blood-consuming neurons. 3. Brain scans only show correlation, not causation- We might be able to say that certain brian activity and behavior seem to be connected, but you never know whether an uncontrollable "third variable" might be mucking up the results (note how these experiments involve some math- maybe the brian regions are just showing activity because of math calculations?)
There seems to be a lot of grant money out there for people who say "hey! I know! let's research X by sticking people doing X in a brain scanner!" The media loves reporting on this stuff for some reason, but it seems many of the results from such studies are pretty shaky and inconclusive, compared to more invasive studies that measure actual receptor activity or responses to drugs- Or involve anatomical studies in cadaver neurons. Again, just my personal opinion- and in some cases, there probably is no other way to get data and some data is better than nothing.
Most Important Lesson In GTD In 3 words...
on
Getting Things Done
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Priority doesn't Matter.
The truth of this fact never occurred to me until I read GTD, but what David says in the book is totally true. Read that sentence carefuly- It takes a while to sink in!
When you decide what projects you're going to take on, you need to be brutally honest about which ones you really want to and will be able to complete and then put 100% of effort into them.
At this point, your goals are broken down into bite-sized chunks (called NAs) and are then placed on a completely flat list with no hierarchy or priority and handled in whatever order you feel is most efficient.
What about deadlines, you ask? The GTD paradigm argues that almost all of them are not real deadlines, since there is almost always plenty of time to complete the task, or, the deadline is flexible- Inflexible AND ALSO soon deadlines are extremely rare and just your own imagination.
...that isn't a prepay phone? Virgin Mobile and other companies make phones that require you to buy a $20 prepaid card at your local grocery store ahead of time. This makes it easy to meter your cell phone usage and prevents this kind of insanity. Great for adults, too.
Oh, and maybe not giving them a cell at all would work, too.
The internet is dangerous for the Iranian government, because it can run arbitrary applications (email, blogs) that people are using to get around the government's restrictions. However, the government still has control over the infrastructure and is now exerting it.
However, wouldn't it be possible, given enough Wifi-enabled devices, to create an entirely rogue Freenet-style network to publish web pages, run applications, send email, etc.?
In that case, there would be no infrastrucutre for anyone to place restrictions on, but it could perform any actions that the internet was capable of, just more slowly, I would think. Anyone know if software exists to build such a WiFi network?
Concurrent Applications are not The Answer
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There is one law in computer programming that is even more certain than Moore's Law: Over time, the user is going to do less work for the computer and the computer is going to do more work for the user.
Remember back when users had to wait in line in front of a terminal to run their punchcards through the mainframe? Back then, human time was cheap and computer time expensive. Nowadays the user's time is paramount.
Multithreaded programming breaks this law: It is hard to do multithreaded programming- Humans just don't think that way very well. To do it in a way that an arbitrary program (i.e. not a ray tracer) can see consistent performance gains in a multi-CPU environment is almost PhD-level hard. Making single-threaded software is already a major undertaking and anyone thinking that, in general, they should start designing all their programs as fundamentally concurrent programs is going to fall behind their competition due to other factors (security, features, etc.).
Instead, the only way concurrent programming is going to play a major role for the majority of software, I believe, is at the compiler and OS levels: The OS and compiler designers are going to have to do their utmost to transform single-threaded software to perform optimally in a multi-CPU environment- These folks are going to have to take up the slack that the slow CPUs clockspeeds are causing in terms of limiting the speed of Software- Concurrent programming at the application-level is only going to play a minor role in this, in my opinion.
...if you create a MP3 player named "Commodore" instead of "rf32erf" or whatever, it isn't going to sell much more under the name "Commodore"- There is nothing about the "Commodore" brand name that would make the guy/gal on the street think it can make a good MP3 player, the way the "Apple" brand name did.
...the "classic Commodore" game business is pretty worthless, too: Can you name one IN-HOUSE Commodore game? Do you think "Aunt Tilley" can when she's looking for Christmas presents for her nephews? All the good games were written by EA or somesuch and not by Commodore directly.
So you sign up at del.icio.us (a rather akward domain name) and you make yourself a user name. After you've signed up, you get a special web link you can put on the bookmark toolbar of your browser.
Then later, whenever you then find a page on the 'net you like and want to "bookmark", instead of using your browser to bookmark it, you click on your link to delicious and a window pops up where you can type in a few "tags" that you think describe the page you're visiting.
What makes delicious so cool is that you don't need to make a complex hierarchy to organize your links: Instead, the program lets you slice 'em and dice 'em based on the tags: Just go to "del.icio.us/userid" and you can browse all your bookmarks.
Like Wikis, delicious is so powerful because it is so incredibly simple: For instance, typing "del.icio.us/tag/waffles" gives you a list of all sites everyone on delicious has bookmarked about waffles. This simplicity also makes it easy for others to create extensions for firefox (foxylicious) and such.
Also cool is that if you find other people who create good bookmarks you can set up to be notified when they post new stuff.
From my expereince, delicious is by far the fastest website dispersing mechanism that exists: Before the big blogs have the latest coolest links, delicious users will already know about it way beforehand, because of the excellent way it can be used to track niche interests on the web.
Ok, so the rover found that there were some funny-looking spherules in a crater on Mars. Maybe those spherules could be created if there had been water a long time ago... So it might be possible that a long time ago there might have been some puddles of water on Mars... This means that it might be possible that there is liquid water around on other planets outside of earth... Water is considered an important ingredient of life, although there is no reason to know that you couldn't have life without water, and even if water is needed, you need many, many more things to be just so for life to form besides a bit of water... Is it just me, or isn't this pretty damn underwhelming compared to the progress we've had in other sciences in the last decade? (human genome, internet, stem cells, etc.)
Why do I always get the feeling that the scientists who get to decide that "major" advances such as Mars water have a personal interest in generating PR for their field?
I agree that research in space is pretty neat and all and is worth doing, but couldn't we all agree that the discoveries recently at NASA have been pretty disappointing, even if they are valuable for some esoteric research fields?
...and how come when the whole "life on Mars" thing happened a few years back, the NASA researchers were all parading in front of TV cameras when they found some interesting "formations" on a mars rock found in a meteor, but then when those formation were found to be somewhat suspect, they were all mum about it... so all that the public saw about doubts of their hyped findings was a small article in the back of Scientific American? Are the NASA researchers really doing good science here?
...just to be clear, I'll gladly admit my ignorance- I hope someone can give some clear answers to my questions and can tell me if there is really something exciting enough about these spherules in some Mars crater...
This is less of an issue with Just In Time compilation (JIT) which theoretically can compile even tighter code than a statically-typed language, since they can use run-time profiling information to analyze and improve the compiled code. Admittedly, many languages, such as Python, do not yet have the types of JIT compilers that allow this. -Conrad Barski
"In order for people to adopt a new computing platform you can't give them something that is 30% better- You really have to give them something that is 200% better and that is what we failed to see at Next."
I commend the designer of the Heron language for trying to simplify some of the complexity of C/C++ (Just like the D language and Eiffel tried) and some persons may benefit from such a tool. But I fail to see how a language with some minor improvements in contract and aspect-oriented programming support is really offering more than 10-20% improvement in terms of design over vanilla C++ - Not that anyone says it has to, but to truly make waves in the programming world I think a larger advance would really be necessary...
Also, I am skeptical of the practicality of new languages that don't support garbage collection- Garbage collection is just such a huge win in terms of productivity in many programmers' eyes, not to mention its ability to prevent viruses/exploits from buffer overflows. I coudn't imagine adopting a new language that doesn't at least have this one critical feature, even if you carry a tiny performance overhead because of it...
Still, it's always nice to see people working on new ideas in language design!
If there was an iPod that looked like the mockup on macmind I would buy it in a... well, flash. Congrats to the person who probably faked the picture for the enticing design!
Although it is hard to OCR text and very hard to OCR cursive text written in historical documents, performing searches on those documents does not require a complete comprehension of the textand is therefore much easier to do.
For instance, the software may be unable to distinguish the word bug from dog in one person's handwriting, but can still mark it with probabilities of the word's possible meanings.
If a person later searches for the word bug or dog at a future date along with other terms, a mathematical calculation can be done for the likelyhood of the match and the searcher can make his/her own judgement to the meaning of the text.
I admit my post was a bit rantish and clearly there are good uses for OOP and modularity in many instances. My point is that the underlying philosophy of deconstructionism in engineering needs to be kept in check sometimes, because it can run counter to the overall goal if applied to blindly. -Conrad
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I read their help pages they hadn't had this feature yet. It's still mostly limited to handling plurals and a few other syntactic variants, however.
The problem with getting good search results are synonyms (different words that mean the same thing) and homonyms (the same word that means different things). With the 32 word limit, you can avoid both of these problems by following a few simple steps- Let's say, for instance, that you live in new york city and are looking for a moving company that specializes in fragile antiques... typically, the vagueness of such a query makes it hard to find good results, but not if you follow these steps:
1. Break your search into 2-4 principal, independent concepts- In my example, the concepts are NYC (the location) moving company (the company type) and antiques (the specialty)
2. For each concept, come up with as many terms as you can that are descriptions or examples of the concept that are very specific and won't trigger homonyms- For instance, you wouldn't want to use the word "New York" because it is too vague and could refer to the state (a company in Albany, NY won't help you). However, "NYC" "Long Island" "Brooklyn" "Queens" "New York City" are great, even if they seem overly specific- You just need one of them to cause a hit on a relevant page.
3. Put parenthesis around the terms for each concept (be sure to put quotes around each compound term) and OR together the items inside parentheses.
This is what the entire search might look like:
("NYC" OR "Long Island" OR "Brooklyn" OR "Queens" OR "Manhattan" OR "Bronx" OR "New York City" OR "Big Apple") ("moving company" OR "moving companies" OR "specialy movers" OR "professional movers" OR "u-haul" OR "apartment movers") ("fragile" OR "antiques" OR "china" OR "difficult to move")
It takes a bit of time to put together (and google will run slooooow because this kind of logic is very difficult for the search engine), but a search like this will give you the best possible results on hard queries.
Paul G has a companion essay to this new one you've got to check out:
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
His old essay explains why high school sucks. This new one explains what you can do about it.
As a medical doctor and software developer I can tell you that this is will be hard to do from several aspects. First of all, "Wiki" is unfortunately just a very whimsical name that is hard for hospital admin folks to take seriously- It just sounds like a major security risk to let something like that have access to HIPAA protected patient information- You can talk till you're blue in the face that it can be securely deployed through SSL, etc. Serious people don't do Wikis will be a knee jerk reaction that you will find hard to overcome. Maybe if they had given it a serious name like "MicroCollaborator" or something instead of Wiki, this wouldn't be a problem.
Another problem with Wikis in a hospital is that people are horribly busy and will never, ever want to take the 2 minutes it takes to learn just how convenient a Wiki system can be (Sure, you'll always have a doc or nurse who is a gadgeteer and will love to play with it, but unless everyone is aboard, Wikis aren't very useful)
Someday, Wikis or a similar technology will be on the cover of Time Magazine or somesuch and then every hospital administrator will be falling over each other trying to install Wikis... but until then, it is a hard sell, I think...
On the other hand, if your medical doctor friend is in a position where he/she can force the other residents, nurses, etc. to use the system, it could be a great asset to the practice of medicine, I think, even if people will only grudgingly participate at first- whether you use it for interdepartment communication, patient notes, etc. it could be useful for all of these.
If your friend can pull this off, he/she would be doing the kind of innovative thinking that all clinicians should be getting involved in and that will make medical care better for all of us.
Fundamentally OOP, XML, RDBMS are very different: RDBMS (relational databases) basically have no true classes, in that you can't inherit 1 table from another. XML can have class-like structures, but they are assigned to an entire document as a whole (through DTDs). OOP has true classes all the way.
Today, these technologies are like oil, water and, well, something else- The next big advances in programming, I think, will come when people learn to make these ideas come together seamlessly- People will say that they already can do this, but I think it is very clear that they don't. C-Omega is Micro$oft's starting salvo in this new technology battle.
...I just want to say:
:)
Congratulations!
You are now on step 1 on a long and tedious journey to building a poorly-designed lisp dialect!
Other posters have already made this case well enough that there's not much point in me elaborating!
...when we still have public funding on all this proprietary patent work? A _true_ fiscal conservative republican would funnel the country's money into development that encourages an open and competitive market place. If people want to use their own private money to gamble on patents then that's fine, but not public money!
Seems to me, we're putting money into public research that feeds private pockets in an unfair way...
Is the prez just trying to promote his religion in the guise of conservatism?
I don't know, just asking...
> Nothing particularly surprising here.
Are you crazy? You must have missed the 'i' in front of iWorks- These screenshots are nothing less than spectacular!
> Compared with other brain imaging techniques, fMRI has excellent spatial resolution.
True, but a neuron has has diameter of 100 microns- I'm just saying that in the popular media "brain scans" have attained a kind of mythical status about their power, and that many scientists in fields like fMRI encourage this kind of thinking (as I often see on tv or in print) when they could be more consciensous about communicating the inherent limitations.
> In any scientific experiment, you manipulate one variable and examine it's effect on some measurement
You're right, but I think that certain studies (like using transgenic mice that have certain receptors in certain brian regions deactivated) gives much clearer causative information that I would argue is qualitatively different. If other neuroscientists agree with this (and I'm not sure they do but it seems clear to me as an outsider) I wish they would emphasize these types of studies more when talking to the press instead of just showing off "pretty pictures" so much.
IANA neuroscientist...
...but in this article, the scientists are trying to draw conclusions about how the brain functions, from a standpoint relevant to economics, by looking at fMRIs. There's nothing wrong, per se, in doing this, but I don't think brains scans are really a very good tool for determining the mechanism of brain activity in this context, or even a very good mechanism for determining the locality of brian activity. This is because:
1. fMRIs don't have very high resolution (not much less than 100 cubic millimeters per voxel)
2. They measure blood flow, which might be related to where the "thinking" in the brain is most intense, but who's to say that the "real work" isn't happening somewhere else by a smaller number of less blood-consuming neurons.
3. Brain scans only show correlation, not causation- We might be able to say that certain brian activity and behavior seem to be connected, but you never know whether an uncontrollable "third variable" might be mucking up the results (note how these experiments involve some math- maybe the brian regions are just showing activity because of math calculations?)
There seems to be a lot of grant money out there for people who say "hey! I know! let's research X by sticking people doing X in a brain scanner!" The media loves reporting on this stuff for some reason, but it seems many of the results from such studies are pretty shaky and inconclusive, compared to more invasive studies that measure actual receptor activity or responses to drugs- Or involve anatomical studies in cadaver neurons. Again, just my personal opinion- and in some cases, there probably is no other way to get data and some data is better than nothing.
Priority doesn't Matter.
The truth of this fact never occurred to me until I read GTD, but what David says in the book is totally true. Read that sentence carefuly- It takes a while to sink in!
When you decide what projects you're going to take on, you need to be brutally honest about which ones you really want to and will be able to complete and then put 100% of effort into them.
At this point, your goals are broken down into bite-sized chunks (called NAs) and are then placed on a completely flat list with no hierarchy or priority and handled in whatever order you feel is most efficient.
What about deadlines, you ask? The GTD paradigm argues that almost all of them are not real deadlines, since there is almost always plenty of time to complete the task, or, the deadline is flexible- Inflexible AND ALSO soon deadlines are extremely rare and just your own imagination.
...that isn't a prepay phone? Virgin Mobile and other companies make phones that require you to buy a $20 prepaid card at your local grocery store ahead of time. This makes it easy to meter your cell phone usage and prevents this kind of insanity. Great for adults, too.
Oh, and maybe not giving them a cell at all would work, too.
The internet is dangerous for the Iranian government, because it can run arbitrary applications (email, blogs) that people are using to get around the government's restrictions. However, the government still has control over the infrastructure and is now exerting it.
However, wouldn't it be possible, given enough Wifi-enabled devices, to create an entirely rogue Freenet-style network to publish web pages, run applications, send email, etc.?
In that case, there would be no infrastrucutre for anyone to place restrictions on, but it could perform any actions that the internet was capable of, just more slowly, I would think. Anyone know if software exists to build such a WiFi network?
There is one law in computer programming that is even more certain than Moore's Law: Over time, the user is going to do less work for the computer and the computer is going to do more work for the user.
Remember back when users had to wait in line in front of a terminal to run their punchcards through the mainframe? Back then, human time was cheap and computer time expensive. Nowadays the user's time is paramount.
Multithreaded programming breaks this law: It is hard to do multithreaded programming- Humans just don't think that way very well. To do it in a way that an arbitrary program (i.e. not a ray tracer) can see consistent performance gains in a multi-CPU environment is almost PhD-level hard. Making single-threaded software is already a major undertaking and anyone thinking that, in general, they should start designing all their programs as fundamentally concurrent programs is going to fall behind their competition due to other factors (security, features, etc.).
Instead, the only way concurrent programming is going to play a major role for the majority of software, I believe, is at the compiler and OS levels: The OS and compiler designers are going to have to do their utmost to transform single-threaded software to perform optimally in a multi-CPU environment- These folks are going to have to take up the slack that the slow CPUs clockspeeds are causing in terms of limiting the speed of Software- Concurrent programming at the application-level is only going to play a minor role in this, in my opinion.
...if you create a MP3 player named "Commodore" instead of "rf32erf" or whatever, it isn't going to sell much more under the name "Commodore"- There is nothing about the "Commodore" brand name that would make the guy/gal on the street think it can make a good MP3 player, the way the "Apple" brand name did.
...the "classic Commodore" game business is pretty worthless, too: Can you name one IN-HOUSE Commodore game? Do you think "Aunt Tilley" can when she's looking for Christmas presents for her nephews? All the good games were written by EA or somesuch and not by Commodore directly.
So you sign up at del.icio.us (a rather akward domain name) and you make yourself a user name. After you've signed up, you get a special web link you can put on the bookmark toolbar of your browser.
Then later, whenever you then find a page on the 'net you like and want to "bookmark", instead of using your browser to bookmark it, you click on your link to delicious and a window pops up where you can type in a few "tags" that you think describe the page you're visiting.
What makes delicious so cool is that you don't need to make a complex hierarchy to organize your links: Instead, the program lets you slice 'em and dice 'em based on the tags: Just go to "del.icio.us/userid" and you can browse all your bookmarks.
Like Wikis, delicious is so powerful because it is so incredibly simple: For instance, typing "del.icio.us/tag/waffles" gives you a list of all sites everyone on delicious has bookmarked about waffles. This simplicity also makes it easy for others to create extensions for firefox (foxylicious) and such.
Also cool is that if you find other people who create good bookmarks you can set up to be notified when they post new stuff.
From my expereince, delicious is by far the fastest website dispersing mechanism that exists: Before the big blogs have the latest coolest links, delicious users will already know about it way beforehand, because of the excellent way it can be used to track niche interests on the web.
Ok, so the rover found that there were some funny-looking spherules in a crater on Mars. Maybe those spherules could be created if there had been water a long time ago... So it might be possible that a long time ago there might have been some puddles of water on Mars... This means that it might be possible that there is liquid water around on other planets outside of earth... Water is considered an important ingredient of life, although there is no reason to know that you couldn't have life without water, and even if water is needed, you need many, many more things to be just so for life to form besides a bit of water... Is it just me, or isn't this pretty damn underwhelming compared to the progress we've had in other sciences in the last decade? (human genome, internet, stem cells, etc.)
Why do I always get the feeling that the scientists who get to decide that "major" advances such as Mars water have a personal interest in generating PR for their field?
I agree that research in space is pretty neat and all and is worth doing, but couldn't we all agree that the discoveries recently at NASA have been pretty disappointing, even if they are valuable for some esoteric research fields?
...and how come when the whole "life on Mars" thing happened a few years back, the NASA researchers were all parading in front of TV cameras when they found some interesting "formations" on a mars rock found in a meteor, but then when those formation were found to be somewhat suspect, they were all mum about it... so all that the public saw about doubts of their hyped findings was a small article in the back of Scientific American? Are the NASA researchers really doing good science here?
...just to be clear, I'll gladly admit my ignorance- I hope someone can give some clear answers to my questions and can tell me if there is really something exciting enough about these spherules in some Mars crater...
---
Conrad Barski
Our lawyers are currently perfecting a new TinyLawsuit specifically to defeat your invention. You will like it- Only _10_ lines of legalese!
The ball is now in your court, Mr. Felten!
Regards, The RIAA/MPAA
This is less of an issue with Just In Time compilation (JIT) which theoretically can compile even tighter code than a statically-typed language, since they can use run-time profiling information to analyze and improve the compiled code. Admittedly, many languages, such as Python, do not yet have the types of JIT compilers that allow this. -Conrad Barski
(in reference to the Next Cube)
"In order for people to adopt a new computing platform you can't give them something that is 30% better- You really have to give them something that is 200% better and that is what we failed to see at Next."
I commend the designer of the Heron language for trying to simplify some of the complexity of C/C++ (Just like the D language and Eiffel tried) and some persons may benefit from such a tool. But I fail to see how a language with some minor improvements in contract and aspect-oriented programming support is really offering more than 10-20% improvement in terms of design over vanilla C++ - Not that anyone says it has to, but to truly make waves in the programming world I think a larger advance would really be necessary...
Also, I am skeptical of the practicality of new languages that don't support garbage collection- Garbage collection is just such a huge win in terms of productivity in many programmers' eyes, not to mention its ability to prevent viruses/exploits from buffer overflows. I coudn't imagine adopting a new language that doesn't at least have this one critical feature, even if you carry a tiny performance overhead because of it...
Still, it's always nice to see people working on new ideas in language design!
--Conrad Barski
If there was an iPod that looked like the mockup on macmind I would buy it in a ... well, flash. Congrats to the person who probably faked the picture for the enticing design!
Although it is hard to OCR text and very hard to OCR cursive text written in historical documents, performing searches on those documents does not require a complete comprehension of the textand is therefore much easier to do.
For instance, the software may be unable to distinguish the word bug from dog in one person's handwriting, but can still mark it with probabilities of the word's possible meanings.
If a person later searches for the word bug or dog at a future date along with other terms, a mathematical calculation can be done for the likelyhood of the match and the searcher can make his/her own judgement to the meaning of the text.
---
Conrad Barski
All right, all right...
I admit my post was a bit rantish and clearly there are good uses for OOP and modularity in many instances. My point is that the underlying philosophy of deconstructionism in engineering needs to be kept in check sometimes, because it can run counter to the overall goal if applied to blindly. -Conrad
Admittedly, very eloquent retort.
you're right- I'm regretting having used the word "modularity", because it is almost impossible to slam such a basic concept... :)