sub theTruth($) { shift; $_ =~ s/Java/Bloated piece of shit/; return $_; }
First, take out that ($) prototype. Perl doesn't use them that way. In Perl, a prototype is not for the same purpose as they are in other languages. They're for type coercion between scalar and array contexts; in this case you're saying "if they give me an array like a stupid git, please coerce it into a scalar context for me, thanks." If they pass a 26-element array, coercing it to a scalar context ends up giving you a numerical 26. Without the prototype, you'd process the first element of the array.
Second, the default argument for s/// is the $_ variable, so you don't need to say $_ =~ s///.
Third, modifying the global $_ in a sub is a recipe for odd bugs in the caller. Localize the damage with local $_, or use a my lexical.
The return keyword in the last statement is optional. It's up to you to decide what's more readable. In a one-liner, I would omit.
sub deAcronymify { local $_ = shift; s/\bPERL\b/Perl/; $_ }
(Further, anyone who thinks that Stephen Colbert, on the show, urging people to change Wikipedia actually MEANS he wants those people to do that betrays an utter ignorance of what the Colbert Report is: a dead-on satire of the right-wing talk show arena. No one should ever take anything the character of Stephen Colbert says seriously.)
You do realize why 555- phone numbers are still popular in television, even though the story may not set in a 555- prefix town? Because people dial them. In every place it was a valid number, a popular song has harassed whomever happened to get 867-5309, whether or not anyone there was named Jenny. There's a reason that the tech movie "The Net" used an invalid IP address. There's a reason that fictional company names used in big-budget movies often go through a full trademark search before the props department can start.
I wonder what your thrust is... it seems a bit elitist. You're perfectly happy working with all of the components of a URL, and can probably do some interesting investigative work by editing them in creative ways.
The vast majority of the population is not a member of your?little&URL%20editing+club, and I really don't see a major reason to require that bit of technical prowess to be able to use the vast majority of network resources effectively. They only know URLs from the "dubya dubya dubya" stuff that they hear in a radio advertisement, and for them, it's all they need to get started.
Clicking a hyperlink isn't actually a user using URLs. The user is just using the hyperlink. All that URL stuff is just an implementation detail behind the scenes, mostly unseen, where all implementation details should be.
Yes, browsers expose URLs in tooltips and status bars and properties boxes, as well as in other ways. Sometimes you need to learn a bit of this to protect yourself from goatse.cx or virusland.com. In my opinion, all this is a just a crappy stopgap in a leaky metaphor. User interfaces for most products should not require especially technical knowledge of the implementation.
Is this dupe a Backslash article, or just the run-of-the-mill kind of dupe? Like, did Zonk read the previous replies and decide that there wasn't enough ad hits, or did Zonk NOT even read the little sidebar that's RIGHT THERE ON THE FRONT PAGE that says "Older Stuff: The End of E3?" and decide to crank out this blurb?
I know that in this day and age, it's too much to ask for the editors of a for-profit site to be competent in English, even if that's their native language. Even Associated Press articles have gotten past proofreaders with the occasional homonym slip.
The word of the day is than.
The word 'than' is used as a part of a comparison. Examples: it's better than nothing; it's less than thrilling; six is greater than four.
The word 'then' is used as a conjunction. Two common cases are if-then or to establish a sequence. Examples: if he enters the biathlon then he may compete; this biathlon starts with a biking component, then ends with a running component.
I have always boggled at how geeks must always structure and type things accurately to get computers to understand them, but then completely fail to express themselves as accurately in any other form of communication.
A MacOSX program called VirtuaDesktops has integrated this sort of thing, but it's still a bit finicky. You knock the laptop and it switches to the next desktop in the direction you knocked. It needs some debouncing because the recoil often just switches you right back to where you were.
If you take out a loan, at first there is net zero change to your finances. You owe $X but you have $X in your pocket. However, as time goes on, you also owe the interest. You are almost certainly getting charged interest that is HIGHER than any bank account or fluid street investment can accrue, so you are HURTING yourself by taking out a loan to "have money in the bank."
The standard advice to anyone, and Alan Greenspan constantly had to explain this to Congress too, is a three-pronged attack:
Pay off your debts, the highest interest debts first. Forget about trying to invest for now. Anything else is irresponsible.
Once you are out of debt, build up an emergency fund to cover any contingencies. Forget about trying to invest for now. Anything else is irresponsible.
Once you are out of debt AND you have an emergency fund (e.g., six months rent and food to cover you if you're out of a job), THEN you should invest to outrun inflation.
If you live austerely, putting most of your disposable income into investments instead of luxuries, you will accelerate this process. Once it is appropriate, invest in a mix of low, medium and high risk funds, per your investment goals. Get in the habit of putting money into a retirement fund (401k, Roth IRA, etc.) on a regular basis, such as direct deposit. This will build up a faster-than-market curve on your investments in fat times, and will continue to rise at market rates in lean times (e.g. again, if you're out of a job).
Put simply, pay back that foolish loan as fast as possible!
And then comes a series of decade-long court battles over who invented what.
Take for example the Xerox PARC "Unistroke" patent. I happened to visit PARC before I saw the first PalmOS machines come out, and saw Unistroke in action. Some conference rooms had wall-mounted "sign up" devices on the wall by the door, which offered unistroke entry. PalmOS comes out with a very similar "Graffiti" concept. Great fit for the idea--
arguably better than the whole-word recognition that Apple Newton was trying. Several years pass where everyone who was anyone learns how to jot down stuff in Graffiti. And then the lawyers got involved. Over ten years later, the dust is starting to settle, and for what?
And those who didn't enter their thoughts in one-stroke alphabets entered their thoughts with teeny two-thumb keyboards. Hm, that sounds familiar... RIM Blackberry vs who was that?
No matter which side you choose to support, and I think everyone's put forward good arguments for and against every conceivable angle, when it ends up in court, everyone loses.
Pure research is great. Xerox got burned in the whole Apple Lisa / Macintosh thing, so they sorta swung the other way with Unistroke. There has to be a middle ground, though. Right?
I think you misunderstand. AMD/ATI is probably *thrilled* to say that there's AMD in a MacBook Pro. But the fear is that Apple has likely gotten all sorts of agreement with Intel that they *not* include AMD components, and thus, Apple would dump AMD/ATI.
Until now, Intel only had to worry about the processor market role that they played with Apple. Now they are sharing a motherboard with their competition, and the lawyers are likely to be sharpening their pencils and pondering how to get more money or more exclusivity from Apple.
I might be missing something, but I found NO mention of the platforms this game format supports out of the box. The Buredo ("blade" in Japanese syllables) folks should mention it SOMEWHERE before people bother to download stuff.
The first sample story is a Windows EXE, but from the tutorial files I just browsed, it doesn't look like it would be particularly hard to make a Un*x/Linux/OSX version out of nothing more than perl-sdl or pygame. The story script is essentially a big text file and graphics and sound assets.
I had for years seen the cover of the tv-drama-made-dvd "Joan of Arc" with Leelee Sobieski whenever passing through the department stores. It's a bargain basement movie, but never rose to the level of curiosity required to spend ten bucks on it.
So on Netflix, I clicked on all the titles Leelee Sobieski was in. And sure enough, they filtered into my mailbox over time. "Deep Impact? Dangerous Liaisons? Never Been Kissed?! When and why did I add those?" My wife did the same thing with Johnny Depp last year, and we both agree there was some really wacked out stuff over his career.
Many bridges can take huge amounts of stress load from above (pedestrians, cars, trucks, tanks), but cannot take anywhere near the same amount of stress from below. Just because a plane's cabin floor can support the consistent evenly spread pressurized cabin forces, doesn't mean it can support a centralized explosive cargo hold force.
Dang, and I thought I was a psychic when I was able to confirm that my friend was typing "EC34J8" when I was presented a grainy scratchy.gif of those very letters! It just captchas the imagination, don't it?
Except for the fact that the mere measurement to determine an electron's state is what causes the state to change on that electron, and by entanglement, the state of the other electron too. So, how are you going to know how often an electron is changing state without any observation?
There are plenty of source-lines-of-code value estimators out there. One which I have used out of curiosity was sloccount (http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/), which took various models of code-lines per man-day and extrapolated from there.
As an undergrad in the 80s, I worked with some computers in a university chemistry lab. In this lab, one of the research professors was developing "shape fitting" methods to design drug molecules. Need to attack a certain receptor? Design a drug that fits. Need to protect a certain receptor? Design a drug that plugs the hole until the intended natural molecule is present. It was all very next-century super-futuristic stuff.
Now that computers should be able to handle that task easily, I rarely hear anything about it anymore. And honestly, there's a lot more than geometry and a few chemical bonds that need to be better understood. We all thought buckyballs would be completely inert and pass through the system... until we actually found that living bodies can get choked up with them. It's like explaining how bees fly-- there's a lot to the science which is still just guesswork and lab experiments.
Lastly, it may be great if a new treatment helps 94% of patients... unless you fall in the 6% it doesn't help. Everything is statistical until it's personal. There are a lot of areas of the response tree which are not known, or even if a certain branch of pathy is known, there are risks in all modes of treatment.
Somehow, I don't think human fuzzy-thinking seat-of-the-pants gut-instinct doctors will be replaced with deterministic analytical machinery anytime soon.
Seriously, look through the back changelogs-- there's a HUGE list of new features and capabilities and tweaks and improvements on EVERY dot release. Yet it's still binary-compatible with ancient.blend files (and the ancient versions of blender can load the newer.blend files ignoring for future parameters). Pretty impressive really.
For the one video linked, I'm amazed it didn't get slashdotted immediately. Very interesting to watch the launch sequence. At 3 min, I thought it was getting a bit boring, but wondered what else was interesting in the rest of the footage. At about 8 min, it got interesting again, with the very quick transition from "over the clouds" to "underwater". Not much new to see after 9 min though.
I do wish my webcam could deal with that wide a range of operating environments though! You quickly forget the engineering that goes into something as simple as a camera housing.
Okay, so next time I'm down at the computer store, I need to buy a better machine.
Yes, an Apple Quartet Quad Core with four extra Core Seed slots for more Cores later. What color? I hear that Mauve has more RAM.
Speakable Items and VoiceOver
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd like to believe this, but frankly, Apple has been letting their TTS and STT features languish since they were introduced to Mac OSX.
Speakable Items (speech to text commands) are a very simple arrangement: the engine is listening for a finite set of strings at any given time, so error rates are low. Fortunately, the set of strings is gathered from a set of filenames, so it's super-easy to make new strings and organize them by application. Unfortunately, most of the newer applications that are bundled with OSX have no hooks for automation nor sample scripts as speakable items. The speakable item must be an AppleScript or.app, for no discernable reason; I would love to be able to have voice-activated shell scripts without going through some ugly hack of a wrapper script, since it's "Unix" and all.
VoiceOver (text to speech prompting) is also fairly straightforward, but there's limited support and somewhat inconsistent controls. Many of the blind folks I've seen using voice prompts on other devices want their voice prompts to be very fast, even so far as to blur the words together into abstract "earcons." The AppleScript-invoked speech does not honor the OSX talking speed preferences, so the words just ramble on taking forever to finish. The talking is not a separately controllable volume channel, so if you turn up the iTunes, then the TTS voice will start yelling at you to compete, or worse, not be able to escape the iTunes mute control.
This is just a rumor, but for the sake of those who like or need good voice features in their interfaces, I hope it signals a new drive to finish what they've started here.
Slashdot Mirror
First, take out that ($) prototype. Perl doesn't use them that way. In Perl, a prototype is not for the same purpose as they are in other languages. They're for type coercion between scalar and array contexts; in this case you're saying "if they give me an array like a stupid git, please coerce it into a scalar context for me, thanks." If they pass a 26-element array, coercing it to a scalar context ends up giving you a numerical 26. Without the prototype, you'd process the first element of the array.
Second, the default argument for s/// is the $_ variable, so you don't need to say $_ =~ s///.
Third, modifying the global $_ in a sub is a recipe for odd bugs in the caller. Localize the damage with local $_, or use a my lexical.
The return keyword in the last statement is optional. It's up to you to decide what's more readable. In a one-liner, I would omit.
You do realize why 555- phone numbers are still popular in television, even though the story may not set in a 555- prefix town? Because people dial them. In every place it was a valid number, a popular song has harassed whomever happened to get 867-5309, whether or not anyone there was named Jenny. There's a reason that the tech movie "The Net" used an invalid IP address. There's a reason that fictional company names used in big-budget movies often go through a full trademark search before the props department can start.
I wonder what your thrust is... it seems a bit elitist. You're perfectly happy working with all of the components of a URL, and can probably do some interesting investigative work by editing them in creative ways.
The vast majority of the population is not a member of your?little&URL%20editing+club, and I really don't see a major reason to require that bit of technical prowess to be able to use the vast majority of network resources effectively. They only know URLs from the "dubya dubya dubya" stuff that they hear in a radio advertisement, and for them, it's all they need to get started.
Clicking a hyperlink isn't actually a user using URLs. The user is just using the hyperlink. All that URL stuff is just an implementation detail behind the scenes, mostly unseen, where all implementation details should be.
Yes, browsers expose URLs in tooltips and status bars and properties boxes, as well as in other ways. Sometimes you need to learn a bit of this to protect yourself from goatse.cx or virusland.com. In my opinion, all this is a just a crappy stopgap in a leaky metaphor. User interfaces for most products should not require especially technical knowledge of the implementation.
Is this dupe a Backslash article, or just the run-of-the-mill kind of dupe? Like, did Zonk read the previous replies and decide that there wasn't enough ad hits, or did Zonk NOT even read the little sidebar that's RIGHT THERE ON THE FRONT PAGE that says "Older Stuff: The End of E3?" and decide to crank out this blurb?
I know that in this day and age, it's too much to ask for the editors of a for-profit site to be competent in English, even if that's their native language. Even Associated Press articles have gotten past proofreaders with the occasional homonym slip.
The word of the day is than .
The word 'than' is used as a part of a comparison. Examples: it's better than nothing; it's less than thrilling; six is greater than four.
The word 'then' is used as a conjunction. Two common cases are if-then or to establish a sequence. Examples: if he enters the biathlon then he may compete; this biathlon starts with a biking component, then ends with a running component.
I have always boggled at how geeks must always structure and type things accurately to get computers to understand them, but then completely fail to express themselves as accurately in any other form of communication.
A MacOSX program called VirtuaDesktops has integrated this sort of thing, but it's still a bit finicky. You knock the laptop and it switches to the next desktop in the direction you knocked. It needs some debouncing because the recoil often just switches you right back to where you were.
Lemme 'splain something.
If you take out a loan, at first there is net zero change to your finances. You owe $X but you have $X in your pocket. However, as time goes on, you also owe the interest. You are almost certainly getting charged interest that is HIGHER than any bank account or fluid street investment can accrue, so you are HURTING yourself by taking out a loan to "have money in the bank."
The standard advice to anyone, and Alan Greenspan constantly had to explain this to Congress too, is a three-pronged attack:
If you live austerely, putting most of your disposable income into investments instead of luxuries, you will accelerate this process. Once it is appropriate, invest in a mix of low, medium and high risk funds, per your investment goals. Get in the habit of putting money into a retirement fund (401k, Roth IRA, etc.) on a regular basis, such as direct deposit. This will build up a faster-than-market curve on your investments in fat times, and will continue to rise at market rates in lean times (e.g. again, if you're out of a job).
Put simply, pay back that foolish loan as fast as possible!
It's not Forbe's, it's Forbes.
And then comes a series of decade-long court battles over who invented what.
Take for example the Xerox PARC "Unistroke" patent. I happened to visit PARC before I saw the first PalmOS machines come out, and saw Unistroke in action. Some conference rooms had wall-mounted "sign up" devices on the wall by the door, which offered unistroke entry. PalmOS comes out with a very similar "Graffiti" concept. Great fit for the idea-- arguably better than the whole-word recognition that Apple Newton was trying. Several years pass where everyone who was anyone learns how to jot down stuff in Graffiti. And then the lawyers got involved. Over ten years later, the dust is starting to settle, and for what?
And those who didn't enter their thoughts in one-stroke alphabets entered their thoughts with teeny two-thumb keyboards. Hm, that sounds familiar... RIM Blackberry vs who was that?
No matter which side you choose to support, and I think everyone's put forward good arguments for and against every conceivable angle, when it ends up in court, everyone loses .
Pure research is great. Xerox got burned in the whole Apple Lisa / Macintosh thing, so they sorta swung the other way with Unistroke. There has to be a middle ground, though. Right?
deci, centi, milli, micro, nano, pico, femto, atto, zepto, yocto...
Wow, this is Unix! I know this!!
--Lex
Seriously, why did I even bother to give my eyeballs to that article?
I think you misunderstand. AMD/ATI is probably *thrilled* to say that there's AMD in a MacBook Pro. But the fear is that Apple has likely gotten all sorts of agreement with Intel that they *not* include AMD components, and thus, Apple would dump AMD/ATI.
Until now, Intel only had to worry about the processor market role that they played with Apple. Now they are sharing a motherboard with their competition, and the lawyers are likely to be sharpening their pencils and pondering how to get more money or more exclusivity from Apple.
I might be missing something, but I found NO mention of the platforms this game format supports out of the box. The Buredo ("blade" in Japanese syllables) folks should mention it SOMEWHERE before people bother to download stuff.
The first sample story is a Windows EXE, but from the tutorial files I just browsed, it doesn't look like it would be particularly hard to make a Un*x/Linux/OSX version out of nothing more than perl-sdl or pygame. The story script is essentially a big text file and graphics and sound assets.
Credit where it's due-- It's Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. "Prose and Cons." I think it was his debut.
I had for years seen the cover of the tv-drama-made-dvd "Joan of Arc" with Leelee Sobieski whenever passing through the department stores. It's a bargain basement movie, but never rose to the level of curiosity required to spend ten bucks on it.
So on Netflix, I clicked on all the titles Leelee Sobieski was in. And sure enough, they filtered into my mailbox over time. "Deep Impact? Dangerous Liaisons? Never Been Kissed?! When and why did I add those?" My wife did the same thing with Johnny Depp last year, and we both agree there was some really wacked out stuff over his career.
Many bridges can take huge amounts of stress load from above (pedestrians, cars, trucks, tanks), but cannot take anywhere near the same amount of stress from below. Just because a plane's cabin floor can support the consistent evenly spread pressurized cabin forces, doesn't mean it can support a centralized explosive cargo hold force.
Dang, and I thought I was a psychic when I was able to confirm that my friend was typing "EC34J8" when I was presented a grainy scratchy .gif of those very letters! It just captchas the imagination, don't it?
Except for the fact that the mere measurement to determine an electron's state is what causes the state to change on that electron, and by entanglement, the state of the other electron too. So, how are you going to know how often an electron is changing state without any observation?
There are plenty of source-lines-of-code value estimators out there. One which I have used out of curiosity was sloccount (http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/), which took various models of code-lines per man-day and extrapolated from there.
As an undergrad in the 80s, I worked with some computers in a university chemistry lab. In this lab, one of the research professors was developing "shape fitting" methods to design drug molecules. Need to attack a certain receptor? Design a drug that fits. Need to protect a certain receptor? Design a drug that plugs the hole until the intended natural molecule is present. It was all very next-century super-futuristic stuff.
Now that computers should be able to handle that task easily, I rarely hear anything about it anymore. And honestly, there's a lot more than geometry and a few chemical bonds that need to be better understood. We all thought buckyballs would be completely inert and pass through the system... until we actually found that living bodies can get choked up with them. It's like explaining how bees fly-- there's a lot to the science which is still just guesswork and lab experiments.
Lastly, it may be great if a new treatment helps 94% of patients... unless you fall in the 6% it doesn't help. Everything is statistical until it's personal. There are a lot of areas of the response tree which are not known, or even if a certain branch of pathy is known, there are risks in all modes of treatment.
Somehow, I don't think human fuzzy-thinking seat-of-the-pants gut-instinct doctors will be replaced with deterministic analytical machinery anytime soon.
Seriously, look through the back changelogs-- there's a HUGE list of new features and capabilities and tweaks and improvements on EVERY dot release. Yet it's still binary-compatible with ancient .blend files (and the ancient versions of blender can load the newer .blend files ignoring for future parameters). Pretty impressive really.
For the one video linked, I'm amazed it didn't get slashdotted immediately. Very interesting to watch the launch sequence. At 3 min, I thought it was getting a bit boring, but wondered what else was interesting in the rest of the footage. At about 8 min, it got interesting again, with the very quick transition from "over the clouds" to "underwater". Not much new to see after 9 min though.
I do wish my webcam could deal with that wide a range of operating environments though! You quickly forget the engineering that goes into something as simple as a camera housing.
Okay, so next time I'm down at the computer store, I need to buy a better machine.
I'd like to believe this, but frankly, Apple has been letting their TTS and STT features languish since they were introduced to Mac OSX.
Speakable Items (speech to text commands) are a very simple arrangement: the engine is listening for a finite set of strings at any given time, so error rates are low. Fortunately, the set of strings is gathered from a set of filenames, so it's super-easy to make new strings and organize them by application. Unfortunately, most of the newer applications that are bundled with OSX have no hooks for automation nor sample scripts as speakable items. The speakable item must be an AppleScript or .app, for no discernable reason; I would love to be able to have voice-activated shell scripts without going through some ugly hack of a wrapper script, since it's "Unix" and all.
VoiceOver (text to speech prompting) is also fairly straightforward, but there's limited support and somewhat inconsistent controls. Many of the blind folks I've seen using voice prompts on other devices want their voice prompts to be very fast, even so far as to blur the words together into abstract "earcons." The AppleScript-invoked speech does not honor the OSX talking speed preferences, so the words just ramble on taking forever to finish. The talking is not a separately controllable volume channel, so if you turn up the iTunes, then the TTS voice will start yelling at you to compete, or worse, not be able to escape the iTunes mute control.
This is just a rumor, but for the sake of those who like or need good voice features in their interfaces, I hope it signals a new drive to finish what they've started here.