Killer apps are overrated. Ruby is an expressive language, period. Studies have shown that software developers can only write a few lines of correct code per day. Making those lines count for as much as possible is important from a correctness, and a maintainability perspective.
Furthermore, application complexity increases non-linearly with lines of code. The fewer the lines of code, the more maintainable and understandable the program.
This is one reason why C is a poor choice of application language, because it requires verbose solutions, and why OCaml is a better choice.
So the winning factor of Ruby over Java is its expressiveness. The big downside is the loss of static typing, and the subsequent loss of certain pre-runtime guarantees. If we could have both, we'd have a real killer language.
Intel's chip has a power draw of less than 2.5 watts for the highest-clocked chip. I don't see how a power draw that's twice that amount would bring Intel's atom to its knees.
It's also in-order, which makes it quite a bit slower.
The alternative is that the inventor attempts to keep it a secret, and the idea dies with him.
Which was a concern back in the days of company loyalty, where you worked for a company until you died or retired. There's far more job mobility nowadays, so trade secrets wouldn't stay secret for very long.
On the double-plus side, not only do companies save money on litigation, patent searches, filings, etc., in some sense much of this money is transferred to employees. Companies would have greater incentive to keep employees within their ranks to maintaing their trade secrets, and thus, any competitive advantages.
I was hoping someone would correct the confused poster. I can't imagine how anyone could claim to be an anarcho-capitalist, and a vehement supporter of "intellectual property". A straight-up capitalist perhaps, but an anarcho-capitalist? Not a chance.
Interesting links too. I'll definitely bookmark them for later perusal.
I think genetic profiling is a valid route for insurance companies. The problem is one of timing: we still don't know enough about when and how these genetic predispositions actually manifest, so it's a bit too early to be basing decisions on predispositions. Eventually, it could prove to be a good indicator, in conjunction with one's lifestyle choices. Just not yet.
Wouldn't it make more sense to go with an aether theory? [...] How about gravity increasing the optical density of the aether?
The problem with ether theories is mainly the Michelson-Morley experiment. Are there ether theories which avoid the MM pitfall? Sort of. The Polarizable Vacuum (PV) is a very interesting theory along the lines of what the the above poster suggested. Instead of matter bending some mysterious "ether", as in ether theories, or bending space-time, as in relativity, matter instead affects the electric and magnetic permeability of space, which causes light to behave as if it were passing through a medium with a higher dialectric constant. From that simple assumption, we can almost rederive full general relativity (GR) wherein electromagnetic equations produce gravitational effects. Gravity is electromagnetism! PV has since been disproven, but it's still a stunningly simple way to think about gravitation in terms of electromagnetism.
And how does this picture manage to get so much attention? By its intention to cause sexual arousal. QED.
No, because the contrast depicted is jarring. As you say, the pose is suggestive, but the individual is lacking in sexual appeal because she's not mature. The image is intended to be jarring, not sexually arousing. A fine distinction perhaps, but an important one.
Child porn is intended to be sexually arousing. This is art.
How about the sick sexual pose that this naked 10-year old child is in?
Honestly, repeating "sick" and "sexual" in every one of your replies only highlights the fact that you consider it sick and sexual, as renoX suggested, not that it actually is sick and sexual by an objective third-party judgment.
Given this issue is so intertwined with ones subjective views of morality, we must ask ourselves, what is an objective measure of "exploitation"? I'll save you long hours, perhaps years of reflection: harm. Was the child harmed in any way, either physically, or psychologically? This is the only important question.
If a child came to harm from a parental decision, then the parents' right to raise their child in any way they see fit is forfeited. Until then, yes, the parents can consent to her doing a naked shoot.
Now, are you going to track down the girl that posed for that cover, assuming there was one, and ascertain whether she was harmed? If she was, then I agree 100% that the cover should be removed. If no such harm exists, then there is no reason to suppress it. Harm is determined on a case-by-case basis, it is not a categorical classification that all things of a certain nature are inherently bad.
The fact that you consider censorship and oppression a valid tool to achieve an entirely personal agenda is not only disheartening, it's frightening.
I would argue that the rest of the code isn't going to be "independent of the quality of developer"
Depends what you mean. I specifically said "the absence of certain runtime errors", as that's exactly the guarantee a type system provides. If you mean code structure and maintainability, then yes, that depends on developer quality. Still, in my experience static type systems tend to produce higher quality code exactly because they are stricter in what they allow.
I tend to find that most such strict languages also aren't as concise or as fun to work in as a high-level, highly dynamic language.
I think you'll find this depends greatly on what statically typed languages you've used. Java, C#, and C/C++ are not what I'm talking about. OCaml, SML and Haskell are where it's at. Scala is kind of a middle road, where it's safer and more expressive than Java, but not quite as safe as OCaml.
I mean, I'm not suggesting every app needs to be an exercise in golfing, but remember, 20 correct lines -- and I bet that's irrespective of language, which is why I prefer concise, high-level languages.
That's exactly the right conclusion to take from it IMO. One can take it a step further and also conclude that stricter languages with more static checking are also preferable, since the compiler can rule out certain classes of bugs independent of the quality of developer.
Even if you reword it to say, "the average developer..." you still have a fairly meaningless statement.
If you want to be pedantic, the correct wording is something like, "a single developer adds about 20 correct lines of code per day, on average".
but doesn't tell you *anything* about any particular basketball player
Perhaps not on a given day, but it will tell you what productivity to expect from a team of basketball players now won't it?
Back to the "studies" (studies? really?), they really only measure an average of whatever specific development teams they measured.
IIRC, the studies were retroactive analyses of code commits vs. resulting bugs, over the entire lifetime of a number of projects, hence the conclusion "20 lines of *correct* code" per day. And these were analyses of high assurance software, written in C, C++ and Ada. Think NASA and the aerospace industry (at least for the studies I read. Hardly your garden variety programmer there. This metric is independent of language, as another poster mentioned.
I find it hard to see exactly what's so objectionable about this metric. The fact that projects go through a rapid prototyping phase followed by a slower incremental phase simply implies that the prototype has many bugs, and incremental changes fix bugs and slowly introduce new non-breaking changes. This does not make the conclusion "nonsense".
1. Why tout 16K lines? Why give an exact number? It's like it's a boast. Except it doesn't really take that long to write 16K lines, so it's sort of a weak boast.
Well, studies have repeatedly shown that a single developer only adds about 20 correct lines of code per day. Assuming this is high quality code that has been well-tested, those 16K lines of code are nothing to scoff at.
2. On the other hand, I wonder why so many lines simply to give me a framebuffer? The card has to be programmed into the right mode, sure, but how can that possibly require 16 thousand lines?
If nobody can improve it further (which is the original reason for improvement patents), then it's hampering innovation in the first place.
If someone were to patent running processes on a computer, where do you think software innovation is going to go?
While I'm not a patent fan in general, these are pure strawman arguments. It's quite obvious that someone will be able to use it, else it wouldn't have been developed. It's also quite clear that someone is able to improve it, namely the patent holder. Saying "nobody" in the above is just plain wrong.
Patenting "computer processes" is also far too vague to ever be patented, so this is another strawman.
Please try and make your arguments absent any glaring logical fallacies next time.
Solution: Global government co-operation and government funded drug research. This way you don't have to use that much money for the adverticing either.
Oh yeah, because we don't alreayd have enough problems with government ruling a single nation, let's just create a global government to rule the world!
Not necessarily. A software system built with proof-carrying code has been proven correct and its reliability is subject only to the reliability of the hardware. Given how easy it is to damage and lose paper, I think machines can be made more reliable than paper methods, just not through the current black box approaches.
"Do you agree with the statement that is it better to have five guilty men go free then put one innocent man in jail?"
This question is sufficiently vague as to be unanswerable by a reasonable person IMO. For instance, are all the people in this question being charged with the exact same crime? I agree that some error rate is inevitable though, if only in cases like this where defendents incriminate themselves.
Of course, guilty verdicts that are later overturned deserve compensation if the verdict was caused by some flaw or oversight in the system, such as police incompetence.
Actually, I always saw it as a philosophical question, not a physical realistic one.
Yes, its use as a metaphor is the intent, and the paper I linked to argues why it's a bad metaphor, because there is a right answer -- which, ironically, the paper gets wrong.;-)
Actually, "complex numbers" aren't used directly in the real world. They are used to get from point A to point C through B which doesn't exist in the real world.
There is no way to know what is used in the "real world", because there is no way to dircectly observe it. We only have indirect observations available. However, as an electrical engineer, I know that transmission line theory is expressed quite naturally by complex math, so one could argue quite persuasively that it "exists" by any sensible definition of that word.
Also, "real world" for me is defined as our universe, math can seem to go places where the universe and its limited x number of dimensions can not.
I do know what you're trying to say, I just don't necesarily agree. Given your current understanding of the world, you believe that things are a certain way. However, our current view of the world is, a) only a model derived by indirect observations, and b) known to be incomplete. There are many computer programs that produce the same output given a limited set of inputs, so we cannot over-generalize the nature of the world based on a model derived from only currently "known inputs".
Thus, making absolute declarations of existence vs. non-existence is hand-waving metaphysics at best, and religion at worst.
No, the chicken did NOT come first, cause I (among others) define a "chicken" as something that comes from a chicken egg.
A chicken is a member of the species Gallus Domesticus. Regardless of the mechanism of formation, by divine creation, cloning, or hatching, any genetic member of that species is a chicken.
More seriously, there are concepts of math that do not have bearing in the real world, nor can be represented by it (ex: infinity)
Just like "complex numbers" are just imaginary and have no possible analogue or use in the real world. At least, that's what we thought for a hundred years.
Axioms themselves can be both discovered and invented. Interesting point about proofs being inventions though. I hadn't considered that line of reasoning.
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ClassCastException and NPE are the easiest to avoid. With adequate unit testing, those are the easiest problems to find.
What a cop out this is. With "adequate" unit testing, almost any problem are easy to find!
I'd like to see unit testing fanatics demonstrate the absence of race conditions. Here's a hint: it's impossible.
Chris Oakasaki on Indentation Syntax. Sorry, but his word carries a lot more weight than yours.
Killer apps are overrated. Ruby is an expressive language, period. Studies have shown that software developers can only write a few lines of correct code per day. Making those lines count for as much as possible is important from a correctness, and a maintainability perspective.
Furthermore, application complexity increases non-linearly with lines of code. The fewer the lines of code, the more maintainable and understandable the program.
This is one reason why C is a poor choice of application language, because it requires verbose solutions, and why OCaml is a better choice.
So the winning factor of Ruby over Java is its expressiveness. The big downside is the loss of static typing, and the subsequent loss of certain pre-runtime guarantees. If we could have both, we'd have a real killer language.
Check out VIA's line of integrated boards. Many of them seem to meet your requirements. They're much slower than desktop processors though.
Intel's chip has a power draw of less than 2.5 watts for the highest-clocked chip. I don't see how a power draw that's twice that amount would bring Intel's atom to its knees.
It's also in-order, which makes it quite a bit slower.
The alternative is that the inventor attempts to keep it a secret, and the idea dies with him.
Which was a concern back in the days of company loyalty, where you worked for a company until you died or retired. There's far more job mobility nowadays, so trade secrets wouldn't stay secret for very long.
On the double-plus side, not only do companies save money on litigation, patent searches, filings, etc., in some sense much of this money is transferred to employees. Companies would have greater incentive to keep employees within their ranks to maintaing their trade secrets, and thus, any competitive advantages.
I was hoping someone would correct the confused poster. I can't imagine how anyone could claim to be an anarcho-capitalist, and a vehement supporter of "intellectual property". A straight-up capitalist perhaps, but an anarcho-capitalist? Not a chance.
Interesting links too. I'll definitely bookmark them for later perusal.
At least "polywell" fusion is backed by ordinary physics!
I think genetic profiling is a valid route for insurance companies. The problem is one of timing: we still don't know enough about when and how these genetic predispositions actually manifest, so it's a bit too early to be basing decisions on predispositions. Eventually, it could prove to be a good indicator, in conjunction with one's lifestyle choices. Just not yet.
Wouldn't it make more sense to go with an aether theory? [...] How about gravity increasing the optical density of the aether?
The problem with ether theories is mainly the Michelson-Morley experiment. Are there ether theories which avoid the MM pitfall? Sort of. The Polarizable Vacuum (PV) is a very interesting theory along the lines of what the the above poster suggested. Instead of matter bending some mysterious "ether", as in ether theories, or bending space-time, as in relativity, matter instead affects the electric and magnetic permeability of space, which causes light to behave as if it were passing through a medium with a higher dialectric constant. From that simple assumption, we can almost rederive full general relativity (GR) wherein electromagnetic equations produce gravitational effects. Gravity is electromagnetism! PV has since been disproven, but it's still a stunningly simple way to think about gravitation in terms of electromagnetism.
You can also rotate the face-on galaxies about their axes too, so the assumption seems sound to me.
And how does this picture manage to get so much attention? By its intention to cause sexual arousal. QED.
No, because the contrast depicted is jarring. As you say, the pose is suggestive, but the individual is lacking in sexual appeal because she's not mature. The image is intended to be jarring, not sexually arousing. A fine distinction perhaps, but an important one.
Child porn is intended to be sexually arousing. This is art.
How about the sick sexual pose that this naked 10-year old child is in?
Honestly, repeating "sick" and "sexual" in every one of your replies only highlights the fact that you consider it sick and sexual, as renoX suggested, not that it actually is sick and sexual by an objective third-party judgment.
Given this issue is so intertwined with ones subjective views of morality, we must ask ourselves, what is an objective measure of "exploitation"? I'll save you long hours, perhaps years of reflection: harm. Was the child harmed in any way, either physically, or psychologically? This is the only important question.
If a child came to harm from a parental decision, then the parents' right to raise their child in any way they see fit is forfeited. Until then, yes, the parents can consent to her doing a naked shoot.
Now, are you going to track down the girl that posed for that cover, assuming there was one, and ascertain whether she was harmed? If she was, then I agree 100% that the cover should be removed. If no such harm exists, then there is no reason to suppress it. Harm is determined on a case-by-case basis, it is not a categorical classification that all things of a certain nature are inherently bad.
The fact that you consider censorship and oppression a valid tool to achieve an entirely personal agenda is not only disheartening, it's frightening.
I would argue that the rest of the code isn't going to be "independent of the quality of developer"
Depends what you mean. I specifically said "the absence of certain runtime errors", as that's exactly the guarantee a type system provides. If you mean code structure and maintainability, then yes, that depends on developer quality. Still, in my experience static type systems tend to produce higher quality code exactly because they are stricter in what they allow.
I tend to find that most such strict languages also aren't as concise or as fun to work in as a high-level, highly dynamic language.
I think you'll find this depends greatly on what statically typed languages you've used. Java, C#, and C/C++ are not what I'm talking about. OCaml, SML and Haskell are where it's at. Scala is kind of a middle road, where it's safer and more expressive than Java, but not quite as safe as OCaml.
I mean, I'm not suggesting every app needs to be an exercise in golfing, but remember, 20 correct lines -- and I bet that's irrespective of language, which is why I prefer concise, high-level languages.
That's exactly the right conclusion to take from it IMO. One can take it a step further and also conclude that stricter languages with more static checking are also preferable, since the compiler can rule out certain classes of bugs independent of the quality of developer.
Even if you reword it to say, "the average developer..." you still have a fairly meaningless statement.
If you want to be pedantic, the correct wording is something like, "a single developer adds about 20 correct lines of code per day, on average".
but doesn't tell you *anything* about any particular basketball player
Perhaps not on a given day, but it will tell you what productivity to expect from a team of basketball players now won't it?
Back to the "studies" (studies? really?), they really only measure an average of whatever specific development teams they measured.
IIRC, the studies were retroactive analyses of code commits vs. resulting bugs, over the entire lifetime of a number of projects, hence the conclusion "20 lines of *correct* code" per day. And these were analyses of high assurance software, written in C, C++ and Ada. Think NASA and the aerospace industry (at least for the studies I read. Hardly your garden variety programmer there. This metric is independent of language, as another poster mentioned.
I find it hard to see exactly what's so objectionable about this metric. The fact that projects go through a rapid prototyping phase followed by a slower incremental phase simply implies that the prototype has many bugs, and incremental changes fix bugs and slowly introduce new non-breaking changes. This does not make the conclusion "nonsense".
1. Why tout 16K lines? Why give an exact number? It's like it's a boast. Except it doesn't really take that long to write 16K lines, so it's sort of a weak boast.
Well, studies have repeatedly shown that a single developer only adds about 20 correct lines of code per day. Assuming this is high quality code that has been well-tested, those 16K lines of code are nothing to scoff at.
2. On the other hand, I wonder why so many lines simply to give me a framebuffer? The card has to be programmed into the right mode, sure, but how can that possibly require 16 thousand lines?
That was my first thought too.
If nobody can use something, it's still useless.
If nobody can improve it further (which is the original reason for improvement patents), then it's hampering innovation in the first place.
If someone were to patent running processes on a computer, where do you think software innovation is going to go?
While I'm not a patent fan in general, these are pure strawman arguments. It's quite obvious that someone will be able to use it, else it wouldn't have been developed. It's also quite clear that someone is able to improve it, namely the patent holder. Saying "nobody" in the above is just plain wrong.
Patenting "computer processes" is also far too vague to ever be patented, so this is another strawman.
Please try and make your arguments absent any glaring logical fallacies next time.
Solution: Global government co-operation and government funded drug research. This way you don't have to use that much money for the adverticing either.
Oh yeah, because we don't alreayd have enough problems with government ruling a single nation, let's just create a global government to rule the world!
Slashdot hosts repetitive jokes. News at 11:00.
Not necessarily. A software system built with proof-carrying code has been proven correct and its reliability is subject only to the reliability of the hardware. Given how easy it is to damage and lose paper, I think machines can be made more reliable than paper methods, just not through the current black box approaches.
"Do you agree with the statement that is it better to have five guilty men go free then put one innocent man in jail?"
This question is sufficiently vague as to be unanswerable by a reasonable person IMO. For instance, are all the people in this question being charged with the exact same crime? I agree that some error rate is inevitable though, if only in cases like this where defendents incriminate themselves.
Of course, guilty verdicts that are later overturned deserve compensation if the verdict was caused by some flaw or oversight in the system, such as police incompetence.
Actually, I always saw it as a philosophical question, not a physical realistic one.
;-)
Yes, its use as a metaphor is the intent, and the paper I linked to argues why it's a bad metaphor, because there is a right answer -- which, ironically, the paper gets wrong.
Actually, "complex numbers" aren't used directly in the real world. They are used to get from point A to point C through B which doesn't exist in the real world.
There is no way to know what is used in the "real world", because there is no way to dircectly observe it. We only have indirect observations available. However, as an electrical engineer, I know that transmission line theory is expressed quite naturally by complex math, so one could argue quite persuasively that it "exists" by any sensible definition of that word.
Also, "real world" for me is defined as our universe, math can seem to go places where the universe and its limited x number of dimensions can not.
I do know what you're trying to say, I just don't necesarily agree. Given your current understanding of the world, you believe that things are a certain way. However, our current view of the world is, a) only a model derived by indirect observations, and b) known to be incomplete. There are many computer programs that produce the same output given a limited set of inputs, so we cannot over-generalize the nature of the world based on a model derived from only currently "known inputs".
Thus, making absolute declarations of existence vs. non-existence is hand-waving metaphysics at best, and religion at worst.
No, the chicken did NOT come first, cause I (among others) define a "chicken" as something that comes from a chicken egg.
A chicken is a member of the species Gallus Domesticus. Regardless of the mechanism of formation, by divine creation, cloning, or hatching, any genetic member of that species is a chicken.
More seriously, there are concepts of math that do not have bearing in the real world, nor can be represented by it (ex: infinity)
Just like "complex numbers" are just imaginary and have no possible analogue or use in the real world. At least, that's what we thought for a hundred years.
Axioms themselves can be both discovered and invented. Interesting point about proofs being inventions though. I hadn't considered that line of reasoning.