...just expecting all of the old ones to just disappear is ridiculous.
Oh, don't worry, they'll disappear alright. Books today are printed on acidic paper.
Their pages begin to crumble away within a few years.
In fact, I'm not sure what the point is of this project. Unless they have come
up with some preservation technology and applied it, in a few decades they'll
end up with millions of boxes full of worthless dust.
You can see it in any good university library. There are books on the shelves that
are hundreds of years old and in perfect shape, while books printed a decade or
two ago are badly yellowed and crumbling away. And that's hard-bound books;
paperbacks disintegrate even more quickly.
OK then, never mind a flag, and never mind Wikipedia and its ilk.
How about writing some legitimate political commentary with the key threaded through it? Design it so that there is no way to remove any of the key material without detracting in a significant way from the content of the political commentary.
It would be interesting to see a court trying to justify itself if it orders that taken down.
Modern BitTorrent clients do UPnP and NAT-PNP fairly well, and modern home routers support UPnP fairly well. So support is progressing.
Good to hear that there is progress.
I hate to be a pessimist, but getting out-of-the-box just-works support for something like this for vanilla computers takes either a long time or forever, depending on how much of a profit motive exists. Especially for cases like this where you need coordinated support from multiple markets to make it work.
It's not mandatory, but if you're unable to accept incoming connections, your download speed will probably be terrible.
Exactly. So Torrent will not be popular, and certainly not standard, until ADSL routers, cable routers, and off-the-shelf PC operating systems all come configured by default to allow incoming torrent connections.
My standard home ADSL router and my MacBook both came with incoming torrent connections blocked by default. I can go into their respective configurations and fix things so that torrents will work well without compromising security, but it's just not worth the time for me. So it's certainly not going to work for the average user, who would need to take a few courses at the local community college before being able to do that.
There are not international concerns over this plant.
There are indeed very serious international concerns over this plant. It's not so much a concern that this plant itself will be a practical way for the Iranians to produce military-grade fissionable materials. Rather, this plant is a major contribution to Iran's nuclear infrastructure. There is a huge pool of engineers and scientists who are gaining hands-on advanced practical knowledge of nuclear science and technology because of this plant. There are also many related manufacturing technologies, and much more, which surround this plant.
Iran does not need this plant to supply itself with electricity. There is no question that their motivation is military.
The fact is that kids with ADD could do fine without it. However, our schools are run in a manner that is not conducive to teaching people with ADD.
Some children with severe attention disorders would not do
well in any kind of learning environment without treatment
with drugs.
And concentration skills are important in society in general.
Many children never do grow out of their attention disorders.
In addition to learning attention techniques, they may also
need to have attention drugs in their arsenal later in life, and
know when to use them and how to use them.
But it's true that if diagnosis and evaluation are done early
and individualized special programs are available, less
children need to be treated with drugs. The problem is
finding the funding.
So this is conventional far-field microscopy. There is a hard physical limit to the resolution in far-field microscopes, about 250nm. Chu is demonstrating a way to leverage existing knowledge about the sample to coax out more information, e.g., the distance between what is already known to be two distinct fluorescent dots.
A far cry from "seeing objects" at that scale using far-field microscopy, as claimed by MSNBC. For that, you need near-field.
I wonder what the advantage could be to using clumsy far-field techniques like that instead of an existing
NSOM instrument that is far more sensitive. In fact, the application mentioned in the paper, deciphering "the structure of large, multisubunit biological complexes in biologically relevant environments," is exactly the application that originally sparked the development of NSOM in the 1980's. Though of course NSOM is used for many other applications today.
Instead of objects measuring 10 nanometers — thought to be the about the smallest scientists could see using such microscopes — Chu came up with a system using existing technology to see objects... as small as half a nanometer.
Unfortunately, neither the poster nor TFA linked Chu's paper, or any other source of real information about Chu's claims. It could very well be that he has done something new and useful, but it sure doesn't sound like it from this article.
Sorry, underpaying the doctors is not the solution. You're just not going to get more
compassion that way.
The answer is to force the pharmaceutical companies
and other commercial medical concerns to lower prices through competition.
I'd like to see proof that health care outcomes are truly equivalent or better in Cuba than in the U.S. - even though in my opinion overall quality of health care in the U.S. has gone downhill.
Instead, let's compare with what happened in Israel. A few years ago, Israel instituted a mandatory national
medical insurance plan. It's different from Obamacare, and the U.K. system, in many ways,
but the most important point is the "Medicine Basket". The Ministry of Health publishes a list of
all the basic medicines that all health plans must provide at subsidized prices. The Ministry is then
able to get the pharmaceuticals to bid against each other. Same goes for medical equipment,
hospitals, etc.
The end result is that - in the opinion of most Israelis - there is top
quality world-class health care, affordable by all.
You are the owner of a company called you... Be professional. Be firm...
Bad idea as a first move. By doing this, you are effectively quitting your current job, and
at the same time looking for a new one at the same company.
First, look around for other opportunities, without letting on at work that you
are the least bit dissatisfied. In the meantime, be diligent, work hard, and show that
you are proud of your good work. That positive attitude will surely help you find
a better position, either at your current company or at another.
Once you have an outside offer, that is the time to start the negotiations. Even then,
don't tell them yet that you have another offer. If they say yes, they'll never have
to know, and your relationship with your employer will stay positive and strong.
If they say no, you'll both understand that it means it's time part ways.
They'll be happy to hear that you're not out in the cold.
Three years ago, the FOSS movement looked like one of the biggest
potential threats against Microsoft. This move was designed to mitigate
that threat, so it was worth investing energy in it.
The idea was to dilute the concept of FOSS in the mind of the public,
thereby weakening the FOSS "brand" as a competitor.
Today, it is appears that Apple and Google are far bigger threats to Microsoft than
FOSS ever will be. So Microsoft will not be investing significant energy
in trying to dilute the concept of FOSS anymore.
Well, the WiFi chipset is exactly the same as in other Apple devices that have been approved,
as checked by the IsraelTech.Net blog.
True, there is the technical legal requirement that they file papers locally and get their rubber stamp,
but in these kinds of cases the authorities usually don't go to the extreme of confiscating devices
and fining people.
I wonder what's different in this case? Maybe it's this little item, claimed in a talkback post
in the article on IsraelNationalNews.com:
An Israeli company, Patango, has the exclusive marketing rights for the IPad in Israel. One of the company's lead partners is Nehemia Peres.
I bet you'll never guess who's his daddy.
Why, of course, Shimon Peres, the president of Israel.
Why did you hold of for so long? I'm genuinely curious. Not knowing anything else, if I were you I would have upgraded as soon as the Leopard/iWord/iLife boxed set were released at the absolute latest.
This is my first Mac, I'm really a Linux guy. So I was naive enough to look at the
feature list and reviews for Leopard, and decide that it wasn't worth $120 for an upgrade
I just didn't need. Why slow down my machine and fill up my hard disk
for upgrades to apps I don't use, and a shiner GUI than one that is already
far shinier than what I need? And after all, Tiger is still officially supported.
Ha. Silly me.
Real Mac users just upgrade when told to and don't ask any questions.
The "flawed" version was written by David Turner over 30 years ago.
At that time, his version was meant to illustrate the expressiveness of
pure functional languages, not to achieve speed.
The discussion you reference was as much about what algorithm
is "the genuine sieve of Eratosthenes" as about speed. You can
read all about it in O'Neil's paper that came out of that discussion,
"The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes".
But yes, there are subtle issues in the speed of sieve algorithms.
And yes, this is a good example. Compare O'Neil's work
to the imperative papers she references.
You can see how much easier it is to achieve the same results in a
functional setting than in an imperative one.
Then go on the ghc mailing list and educate the people who write the compiler for Haskell and let them know, they are are getting nailed by several of these problems.
There are no such problems with the GHC compiler. As with any serious compiler,
there are plenty of performance tuning issues. But those issues would be the
same - or perhaps even more knotty - if GHC were written in, say, C.
And I'm sure you realize that neither you nor I will soon be educating the gurus who work on GHC.:)
If this were the case then Perl 6 would have stuck with the Pugs implementation.
That's silly. Pugs was not designed as a production implementation of Perl 6 - it was a proof of concept for the new syntax. The fact that Pugs was so surprisingly easy to implement, and so surprisingly performant before any effort at all was put into its performance, was a stunning demonstration of the power of functional programming.
GHC would have stuck with Darcs and not gone to GIT.
GHC did stick with Darcs. There was a time when a move to Git was considered, but it had nothing to do with Darcs being written in a functional language. At the time, the Darcs team was not big enough or well enough organized to keep up with the heavy support demands of being the RCS for a large and growing compiler project. That has changed. Darcs has become one of the best run (and most fun) open source projects, with a large team of active and talented developers. Darcs is now an excellent choice of RCS even for very large projects.
That is typical of the process that has been happening with functional programming during the past few years - a quick transition from the theoretical to the best-of-breed in practice.
So if you want to continue this conversation start reading the various performance related discussions. There are 2 decades of papers on trying to resolve specific examples of this problem.
If you're interested in history, you are the one who ought to have a good look at that literature. Learn to tell the difference between knotty problems that were identified twenty years ago, and the astonishing continuous progress that has been made since then.
But if you want to continue this conversation, you should look at what is happening in the present. One thing that has happened is that you no longer need to read academic papers to learn and use functional languages in practice. There are books, online tutorials and resources, many developer-friendly tools, and a huge and super-friendly community.
The shootout is a nice demonstration that speed optimization is another aspect of the increasing strength of modern functional compilers and functional programming techniques. No one will claim that a functional language can beat C at speed right now, but it says a lot that such high level languages can now compete well in the same league as C. As hardware architectures continue to move farther and farther away from the classical imperative model, watch for this trend to continue.
I love functional languages but putting your head in the sand regarding where the problems are and considering the evaluations FUD is not going to advance the cause.
I called the great-grandparent post FUD because it is FUD. These are common misconceptions, caused by lingering impressions of where functional programming was decades ago. Open your eyes, look at the facts, see what is happening now. Don't let the FUD lull you into apathy.
Slashdot Mirror
...just expecting all of the old ones to just disappear is ridiculous.
Oh, don't worry, they'll disappear alright. Books today are printed on acidic paper. Their pages begin to crumble away within a few years.
In fact, I'm not sure what the point is of this project. Unless they have come up with some preservation technology and applied it, in a few decades they'll end up with millions of boxes full of worthless dust.
You can see it in any good university library. There are books on the shelves that are hundreds of years old and in perfect shape, while books printed a decade or two ago are badly yellowed and crumbling away. And that's hard-bound books; paperbacks disintegrate even more quickly.
Better be careful not to stand in a puddle when you open your car door.
The web site was down for a short time. First down completely, then 505 and redirect to a static backup page. Now it's working again.
OK then, never mind a flag, and never mind Wikipedia and its ilk.
How about writing some legitimate political commentary with the key threaded through it? Design it so that there is no way to remove any of the key material without detracting in a significant way from the content of the political commentary.
It would be interesting to see a court trying to justify itself if it orders that taken down.
Modern BitTorrent clients do UPnP and NAT-PNP fairly well, and modern home routers support UPnP fairly well. So support is progressing.
Good to hear that there is progress.
I hate to be a pessimist, but getting out-of-the-box just-works support for something like this for vanilla computers takes either a long time or forever, depending on how much of a profit motive exists. Especially for cases like this where you need coordinated support from multiple markets to make it work.
It's not mandatory, but if you're unable to accept incoming connections, your download speed will probably be terrible.
Exactly. So Torrent will not be popular, and certainly not standard, until ADSL routers, cable routers, and off-the-shelf PC operating systems all come configured by default to allow incoming torrent connections.
My standard home ADSL router and my MacBook both came with incoming torrent connections blocked by default. I can go into their respective configurations and fix things so that torrents will work well without compromising security, but it's just not worth the time for me. So it's certainly not going to work for the average user, who would need to take a few courses at the local community college before being able to do that.
There are not international concerns over this plant.
There are indeed very serious international concerns over this plant. It's not so much a concern that this plant itself will be a practical way for the Iranians to produce military-grade fissionable materials. Rather, this plant is a major contribution to Iran's nuclear infrastructure. There is a huge pool of engineers and scientists who are gaining hands-on advanced practical knowledge of nuclear science and technology because of this plant. There are also many related manufacturing technologies, and much more, which surround this plant.
Iran does not need this plant to supply itself with electricity. There is no question that their motivation is military.
The fact is that kids with ADD could do fine without it. However, our schools are run in a manner that is not conducive to teaching people with ADD.
Some children with severe attention disorders would not do well in any kind of learning environment without treatment with drugs.
And concentration skills are important in society in general. Many children never do grow out of their attention disorders. In addition to learning attention techniques, they may also need to have attention drugs in their arsenal later in life, and know when to use them and how to use them.
But it's true that if diagnosis and evaluation are done early and individualized special programs are available, less children need to be treated with drugs. The problem is finding the funding.
See https://www.entropay.com/
Disclaimer: I'm biased as I was one of the founders!
This looks like a great service - the best that I've seen in this topic, among those that don't require an existing account at a specific bank.
Here are several other pre-paid card services that are designed for youth accounts, but can be used as a plain pre-paid card as well:
Ah, here is Chu's paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09163.html
So this is conventional far-field microscopy. There is a hard physical limit to the resolution in far-field microscopes, about 250nm. Chu is demonstrating a way to leverage existing knowledge about the sample to coax out more information, e.g., the distance between what is already known to be two distinct fluorescent dots.
A far cry from "seeing objects" at that scale using far-field microscopy, as claimed by MSNBC. For that, you need near-field.
I wonder what the advantage could be to using clumsy far-field techniques like that instead of an existing NSOM instrument that is far more sensitive. In fact, the application mentioned in the paper, deciphering "the structure of large, multisubunit biological complexes in biologically relevant environments," is exactly the application that originally sparked the development of NSOM in the 1980's. Though of course NSOM is used for many other applications today.
TFA states:
Instead of objects measuring 10 nanometers — thought to be the about the smallest scientists could see using such microscopes — Chu came up with a system using existing technology to see objects... as small as half a nanometer.
Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NSOM) has been an active area of research for over 25 years, and sub-nanometer aperture instruments have been on the market for over 20 years.
Unfortunately, neither the poster nor TFA linked Chu's paper, or any other source of real information about Chu's claims. It could very well be that he has done something new and useful, but it sure doesn't sound like it from this article.
This slashdot article and TFA provide absolutely no technical details, and no link to them.
Could someone please provide that? Thanks.
Sorry, underpaying the doctors is not the solution. You're just not going to get more compassion that way.
The answer is to force the pharmaceutical companies and other commercial medical concerns to lower prices through competition.
I'd like to see proof that health care outcomes are truly equivalent or better in Cuba than in the U.S. - even though in my opinion overall quality of health care in the U.S. has gone downhill.
Instead, let's compare with what happened in Israel. A few years ago, Israel instituted a mandatory national medical insurance plan. It's different from Obamacare, and the U.K. system, in many ways, but the most important point is the "Medicine Basket". The Ministry of Health publishes a list of all the basic medicines that all health plans must provide at subsidized prices. The Ministry is then able to get the pharmaceuticals to bid against each other. Same goes for medical equipment, hospitals, etc.
The end result is that - in the opinion of most Israelis - there is top quality world-class health care, affordable by all.
You are the owner of a company called you... Be professional. Be firm...
Bad idea as a first move. By doing this, you are effectively quitting your current job, and at the same time looking for a new one at the same company.
First, look around for other opportunities, without letting on at work that you are the least bit dissatisfied. In the meantime, be diligent, work hard, and show that you are proud of your good work. That positive attitude will surely help you find a better position, either at your current company or at another.
Once you have an outside offer, that is the time to start the negotiations. Even then, don't tell them yet that you have another offer. If they say yes, they'll never have to know, and your relationship with your employer will stay positive and strong. If they say no, you'll both understand that it means it's time part ways. They'll be happy to hear that you're not out in the cold.
If true, this sounds like a stupid rule, but - just do it. Write "Please". It's that big of a deal?
Three years ago, the FOSS movement looked like one of the biggest potential threats against Microsoft. This move was designed to mitigate that threat, so it was worth investing energy in it. The idea was to dilute the concept of FOSS in the mind of the public, thereby weakening the FOSS "brand" as a competitor.
Today, it is appears that Apple and Google are far bigger threats to Microsoft than FOSS ever will be. So Microsoft will not be investing significant energy in trying to dilute the concept of FOSS anymore.
So anyone with an iPad would be very interested to know that Israel was stealing these computers at the borders.
FWIW, the iPads were not being stolen. The rightful owners could reclaim their property when they exited the country.
Well, yeah. After they pay a $12 per day "storage fee".
Oh, that talkback is referring to a post on the Israel Matzav blog.
Well, the WiFi chipset is exactly the same as in other Apple devices that have been approved, as checked by the IsraelTech.Net blog.
True, there is the technical legal requirement that they file papers locally and get their rubber stamp, but in these kinds of cases the authorities usually don't go to the extreme of confiscating devices and fining people.
I wonder what's different in this case? Maybe it's this little item, claimed in a talkback post in the article on IsraelNationalNews.com:
An Israeli company, Patango, has the exclusive marketing rights for the IPad in Israel. One of the company's lead partners is Nehemia Peres. I bet you'll never guess who's his daddy.
Why, of course, Shimon Peres, the president of Israel.
Hmm...
Why did you hold of for so long? I'm genuinely curious. Not knowing anything else, if I were you I would have upgraded as soon as the Leopard/iWord/iLife boxed set were released at the absolute latest.
This is my first Mac, I'm really a Linux guy. So I was naive enough to look at the feature list and reviews for Leopard, and decide that it wasn't worth $120 for an upgrade I just didn't need. Why slow down my machine and fill up my hard disk for upgrades to apps I don't use, and a shiner GUI than one that is already far shinier than what I need? And after all, Tiger is still officially supported.
Ha. Silly me.
Real Mac users just upgrade when told to and don't ask any questions.
Even after the recent security update on Tiger, I still get a kernel panic with the Python code supplied in TFA:
import termios, fcntl
fcntl.fcntl(0, termios.TIOCGWINSZ)
Yeah, I'm planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard soon, after having skipped Leopard. But has Tiger already been abandoned to this extent?
1. Adventure
2. Star Trek
What did you say? Graphics? Oh. Sorry.
3. Pong
Sieve of Eratosthenes is a good example because it has been solved but the discussion of the flaws in older solutions are quite subtle. http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-February/022666.html
The "flawed" version was written by David Turner over 30 years ago. At that time, his version was meant to illustrate the expressiveness of pure functional languages, not to achieve speed.
The discussion you reference was as much about what algorithm is "the genuine sieve of Eratosthenes" as about speed. You can read all about it in O'Neil's paper that came out of that discussion, "The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes".
But yes, there are subtle issues in the speed of sieve algorithms. And yes, this is a good example. Compare O'Neil's work to the imperative papers she references. You can see how much easier it is to achieve the same results in a functional setting than in an imperative one.
Then go on the ghc mailing list and educate the people who write the compiler for Haskell and let them know, they are are getting nailed by several of these problems.
There are no such problems with the GHC compiler. As with any serious compiler, there are plenty of performance tuning issues. But those issues would be the same - or perhaps even more knotty - if GHC were written in, say, C.
And I'm sure you realize that neither you nor I will soon be educating the gurus who work on GHC. :)
If this were the case then Perl 6 would have stuck with the Pugs implementation.
That's silly. Pugs was not designed as a production implementation of Perl 6 - it was a proof of concept for the new syntax. The fact that Pugs was so surprisingly easy to implement, and so surprisingly performant before any effort at all was put into its performance, was a stunning demonstration of the power of functional programming.
GHC would have stuck with Darcs and not gone to GIT.
GHC did stick with Darcs. There was a time when a move to Git was considered, but it had nothing to do with Darcs being written in a functional language. At the time, the Darcs team was not big enough or well enough organized to keep up with the heavy support demands of being the RCS for a large and growing compiler project. That has changed. Darcs has become one of the best run (and most fun) open source projects, with a large team of active and talented developers. Darcs is now an excellent choice of RCS even for very large projects.
That is typical of the process that has been happening with functional programming during the past few years - a quick transition from the theoretical to the best-of-breed in practice.
So if you want to continue this conversation start reading the various performance related discussions. There are 2 decades of papers on trying to resolve specific examples of this problem.
If you're interested in history, you are the one who ought to have a good look at that literature. Learn to tell the difference between knotty problems that were identified twenty years ago, and the astonishing continuous progress that has been made since then.
But if you want to continue this conversation, you should look at what is happening in the present. One thing that has happened is that you no longer need to read academic papers to learn and use functional languages in practice. There are books, online tutorials and resources, many developer-friendly tools, and a huge and super-friendly community.
The shootout is a nice demonstration that speed optimization is another aspect of the increasing strength of modern functional compilers and functional programming techniques. No one will claim that a functional language can beat C at speed right now, but it says a lot that such high level languages can now compete well in the same league as C. As hardware architectures continue to move farther and farther away from the classical imperative model, watch for this trend to continue.
I love functional languages but putting your head in the sand regarding where the problems are and considering the evaluations FUD is not going to advance the cause.
I called the great-grandparent post FUD because it is FUD. These are common misconceptions, caused by lingering impressions of where functional programming was decades ago. Open your eyes, look at the facts, see what is happening now. Don't let the FUD lull you into apathy.