"The Patterns of Chaos" and "The Chaos Weapon", both out of print and hard to come by. I've read them over 20 years ago so I recall my impressions from when I was much younger but still.
All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers.
Not if you consider Ruby or Python a main language.
I wonder if this is revealed in the syntax and logic when compared with what say a Chinese developer might come up with if they were tasked with developing a language?
Look closely at Ruby. Every once in a while I get the impression that certain nuances in it could only have come from a Japanese language designer.
And does anyone who's native tongue is not English and has a knowledge of programming syntax want to comment on this?
I guess I just did, but then when I code I think mostly in English:)
Ha! This post appeared just in time for me. I started experiencing PIO-induced slowness too, and the VBScript above helped. The sad part is that HDD failure is still imminent for me - the fallback to PIO was caused by several cases of bad sectors, all in system files, of all things... Backup is daily mantra for me now.
Usability-wise there wasn't much difference from 9.23 to 9.50 for me. Got a few minor surprises, but didn't really care, since it worked mostly the same.
What did improve is that automatic proxy config finally works, also with passwords. On the downside, some installations eat up CPU and leak memory like Niagara Falls. Curiously, with the same stuff loaded, other installations don't.
Sometimes I wonder if this "age bracket" thing in science shows is really necessary. I don't know much about child raising or education, but let me tell you a story.
When I was in kindergarten, so I must have been around six years old, my mother once arrived early to take me home because a new science show was about to premiere on TV. To give you some background, there were only two TV channels in the country at the time, so any new show of any kind was an event. In any case, the show was probably targeted at older viewers, teens at least. It didn't matter. I understood what I understood, and I absorbed the rest as a "language given". What that latter thing gave me was that I was no stranger to new terms and concepts when I was old enough to understand them. In later years, while other kids fumed at teachers' attempts at giving them new knowledge and ideas at school, I had been used to the process already.
I'm sure the show wasn't the only contributor here but it certainly helped. This show had later become a great TV success and attracted pretty big audience. It was hosted by two academically active physicists who didn't dumb things down "so that the lay audience could get it". (Those who live in my country probably already guessed what the show was.)
What it comes down to is your personality. If you're the kind of person who reads books from a fairly wide range of genres and is interesting in things other than math and CS, go for the liberal arts degree. If the idea of reading for fun and having to think about history, philosophy,.etc makes you roll your eyes, go for the tech degree because the liberal arts school will bore the pants off of you. You'll be more successful if you study what you find interesting.
I wouldn't be so sure about this one. Stuff like history or geography were of no interest for me in elementary and high school. Nowadays I am fascinated with ancient history, archeology, stuff like that.
There's a caveat with my story though: The curricula were boring and the teachers were scary, especially history. So I probably had the potential for interest in these subjects at the time already but the teachers kept killing it.
Science education, world-wide if not in the US, has never been better. Scientists and engineers make up a larger share of our society than ever before in the history of mankind. Religion and ignorance have lost ground, while knowledge and understanding have gained.
Surely you're joking, Mr. or Ms. Johnson. I live in a modern European country, and yet in recent years I've seen astrology on the rise, Joe Average losing his ability to read anything longer than the brand name on a beer can, engineers who are complete ingnorants beyond their specialization. Not to mention a certain IT specialist who recurred to a shaman (FYI, she's Catholic, like most of the population here) because her house had been "cursed with bad luck". Pretty much the same happens in the neighboring countries.
People became disillusioned with science because it helped with a lot of things, but it didn't give answers to their personal problems. We ended up with a culture that, while shaped by science, is very much anti-scientific and anti-intellectual in general. Never in human history has it been so "cool" to not know anything about anything beyond which beer brand is the best and how to have bigger orgasms.
Really? Then I'm sure Vista will get scrapped and we'll see Windows XP back on sale. Not that it was perfect, but at least it worked acceptably. For me personally, more so than the Mac I'm posting from. And I'll shut up now because I'm just venting my frustrations.
I think the Internet is really starting to make its true value known.
Let's just hope this doesn't backfire with some ugly regulations.
The sad part is that they are wasting so much time, money, effort, and lobbying [snipped]
Sad for you or for them? Their time, their money, their effort, etc.:)
I myself create copyrighted stuff that I like to be paid for. That also means that I pay for other people's creations that I want to watch/listen to/use in some other way. But I can't say I don't enjoy watching stubborn, wisdomproof people being taught a lesson in futility of their efforts:)
No, we couldn't, because the content provider will set the "ad" flag during key parts of the actual program, which you don't want to miss.
In a way, AXN already do this. They have TV text with schedules, but they turn it off something like 5 minutes before each show's end, so that you can't check what's next during end credits or commercials.
I concur. For what I buy on DVD, there's no justification for HD. Much of that stuff was recorded for television; on one concert that was shot on film, the grain showed even in the VHS edition. Babylon 5 was made for HDTV, but the low resolution of most CGI scenes spoils the fun even on regular DVD.
So, really, HD sounds like overkill to me.
I'm pretty sure though that the judge-quality-by-numbers monkeys will make the sales dept happy.
Just for the record: I don't have a single 16:9 channel on my cable, I record TV shows on a VCR, and I use my 3.1 megapixel camera at 2MP setting most of the time.:)
The answer just might be in the subject. My experience with Python so far has been that it is much easier to express even complex algorithms in it than in C++ or Java. My day job is a lot of C++ and some Java, but when I need to write a test tool, I usually do it in Python, because what takes an hour to do in Python would take two days in Java. And I have far less experience with Python than with the other two.
I'll tell you a story about getting the design right:
Last year I got interested in the Sudoku puzzles (duh!). I thought I could try writing a program to solve them. Against my experience, I decided to write it in Java. "Python's too slow and explicit types will help me with the design," I thought. Then I spent weeks banging on the code until I got something that was able to solve puzzles up to medium difficulty level, but no further - it would just go on forever.
Finally I got fed up and thought, "What the heck, maybe Python was not such a bad an idea." Three days later I got a complete solver that so far was able to crack all puzzles I tried with it. Only the hardest require any noticeable computation time.
Now, if what many Python programmers say is true, writing the application in Python and then rewriting just the bottlenecks in C or C++ is a good idea.
I think it would be no technical problem at all to make an encoder that can produce "Video Recorder Quality" DVDs, and then sell them for half the price of normal DVDs. That should get rid of a lot of piracy.
That was exactly the practice in Poland some 2 years ago - illustrated magazines used to come with cheap legal copies of movies on VCDs. Now they do with cheap DVDs (but full quality). The second-hand market for these DVDs (which is formally against the licence) is tremendous.
I could live with DRMed content if the price vs. limitations tradeoff were acceptable to me. And that would also mean different models for different kinds of content.
For movies I'd accept a rental-style license: I pay for a given movie and have, say, 3 days to watch it, limited to one device (e.g. my laptop to which I downloaded it). That's OK, I only watch most movies once.
With music, I could rent it first to listen and decide if I like it. But for the stuff I really like, I'd have to be able to have access to it for life, from any place, any device I choose. Or at least have a yearly subscription (my taste does change with time).
These are just examples. Yes, I can accept this kind of limitations, because I don't have to own everything and forever. A lot of content I only need temporarily.
As long as the system is flexible depending on your needs for a specific piece of content, it won't be that bad. The real problem is, what if they decide to "de-authorize" a product, e.g. because they have remixed the album? (Example: Tangerine Dream's "Tyger". Good luck buying the original mix, with original artwork.)
Slashdot Mirror
"The Patterns of Chaos" and "The Chaos Weapon", both out of print and hard to come by. I've read them over 20 years ago so I recall my impressions from when I was much younger but still.
P.S. It's just a small business, give 'em a break. If they don't care that they are breaking the law, why should you?
Because, given some bad luck, he could end up in jail together with, or even instead of, his boss?
All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers.
Not if you consider Ruby or Python a main language.
I wonder if this is revealed in the syntax and logic when compared with what say a Chinese developer might come up with if they were tasked with developing a language?
Look closely at Ruby. Every once in a while I get the impression that certain nuances in it could only have come from a Japanese language designer.
And does anyone who's native tongue is not English and has a knowledge of programming syntax want to comment on this?
I guess I just did, but then when I code I think mostly in English :)
Ha! This post appeared just in time for me. I started experiencing PIO-induced slowness too, and the VBScript above helped. The sad part is that HDD failure is still imminent for me - the fallback to PIO was caused by several cases of bad sectors, all in system files, of all things... Backup is daily mantra for me now.
Usability-wise there wasn't much difference from 9.23 to 9.50 for me. Got a few minor surprises, but didn't really care, since it worked mostly the same.
What did improve is that automatic proxy config finally works, also with passwords. On the downside, some installations eat up CPU and leak memory like Niagara Falls. Curiously, with the same stuff loaded, other installations don't.
Sometimes I wonder if this "age bracket" thing in science shows is really necessary. I don't know much about child raising or education, but let me tell you a story.
When I was in kindergarten, so I must have been around six years old, my mother once arrived early to take me home because a new science show was about to premiere on TV. To give you some background, there were only two TV channels in the country at the time, so any new show of any kind was an event. In any case, the show was probably targeted at older viewers, teens at least. It didn't matter. I understood what I understood, and I absorbed the rest as a "language given". What that latter thing gave me was that I was no stranger to new terms and concepts when I was old enough to understand them. In later years, while other kids fumed at teachers' attempts at giving them new knowledge and ideas at school, I had been used to the process already.
I'm sure the show wasn't the only contributor here but it certainly helped. This show had later become a great TV success and attracted pretty big audience. It was hosted by two academically active physicists who didn't dumb things down "so that the lay audience could get it". (Those who live in my country probably already guessed what the show was.)
I wouldn't be so sure about this one. Stuff like history or geography were of no interest for me in elementary and high school. Nowadays I am fascinated with ancient history, archeology, stuff like that.
There's a caveat with my story though: The curricula were boring and the teachers were scary, especially history. So I probably had the potential for interest in these subjects at the time already but the teachers kept killing it.
Surely you're joking, Mr. or Ms. Johnson. I live in a modern European country, and yet in recent years I've seen astrology on the rise, Joe Average losing his ability to read anything longer than the brand name on a beer can, engineers who are complete ingnorants beyond their specialization. Not to mention a certain IT specialist who recurred to a shaman (FYI, she's Catholic, like most of the population here) because her house had been "cursed with bad luck". Pretty much the same happens in the neighboring countries.
People became disillusioned with science because it helped with a lot of things, but it didn't give answers to their personal problems. We ended up with a culture that, while shaped by science, is very much anti-scientific and anti-intellectual in general. Never in human history has it been so "cool" to not know anything about anything beyond which beer brand is the best and how to have bigger orgasms.
Really? Then I'm sure Vista will get scrapped and we'll see Windows XP back on sale. Not that it was perfect, but at least it worked acceptably. For me personally, more so than the Mac I'm posting from. And I'll shut up now because I'm just venting my frustrations.
I think the Internet is really starting to make its true value known.
Let's just hope this doesn't backfire with some ugly regulations.
The sad part is that they are wasting so much time, money, effort, and lobbying [snipped]
Sad for you or for them? Their time, their money, their effort, etc. :)
I myself create copyrighted stuff that I like to be paid for. That also means that I pay for other people's creations that I want to watch/listen to/use in some other way. But I can't say I don't enjoy watching stubborn, wisdomproof people being taught a lesson in futility of their efforts :)
In a way, AXN already do this. They have TV text with schedules, but they turn it off something like 5 minutes before each show's end, so that you can't check what's next during end credits or commercials.
But then there is TV Guide and the like :)
I for one welcome our new f*ckface overlords!
(Couldn't resist.)
You coined a nice term, thank you.
I concur. For what I buy on DVD, there's no justification for HD. Much of that stuff was recorded for television; on one concert that was shot on film, the grain showed even in the VHS edition. Babylon 5 was made for HDTV, but the low resolution of most CGI scenes spoils the fun even on regular DVD.
:)
So, really, HD sounds like overkill to me.
I'm pretty sure though that the judge-quality-by-numbers monkeys will make the sales dept happy.
Just for the record: I don't have a single 16:9 channel on my cable, I record TV shows on a VCR, and I use my 3.1 megapixel camera at 2MP setting most of the time.
The answer just might be in the subject. My experience with Python so far has been that it is much easier to express even complex algorithms in it than in C++ or Java. My day job is a lot of C++ and some Java, but when I need to write a test tool, I usually do it in Python, because what takes an hour to do in Python would take two days in Java. And I have far less experience with Python than with the other two.
I'll tell you a story about getting the design right:
Now, if what many Python programmers say is true, writing the application in Python and then rewriting just the bottlenecks in C or C++ is a good idea.
That was exactly the practice in Poland some 2 years ago - illustrated magazines used to come with cheap legal copies of movies on VCDs. Now they do with cheap DVDs (but full quality). The second-hand market for these DVDs (which is formally against the licence) is tremendous.
I could live with DRMed content if the price vs. limitations tradeoff were acceptable to me. And that would also mean different models for different kinds of content.
For movies I'd accept a rental-style license: I pay for a given movie and have, say, 3 days to watch it, limited to one device (e.g. my laptop to which I downloaded it). That's OK, I only watch most movies once.
With music, I could rent it first to listen and decide if I like it. But for the stuff I really like, I'd have to be able to have access to it for life, from any place, any device I choose. Or at least have a yearly subscription (my taste does change with time).
These are just examples. Yes, I can accept this kind of limitations, because I don't have to own everything and forever. A lot of content I only need temporarily.
As long as the system is flexible depending on your needs for a specific piece of content, it won't be that bad. The real problem is, what if they decide to "de-authorize" a product, e.g. because they have remixed the album? (Example: Tangerine Dream's "Tyger". Good luck buying the original mix, with original artwork.)