This reads like a news article from the late 19th century. So your comment is actually very pertinent since the industrialists of that age also sought profits above the wel-being of the workers and the environment.
Evolutionarily, you'd expect that a species would gravitate towards more attractive members due to the increased ability of those members to reproduce. But consider that the likelihood of an ugly set of people to actually reproduce is much higher than a set of very attractive people to do so.
Humans are an interesting species. We are able to actually avoid evolution. In several tens of generations, humans will likely be all near-sighted due to our glasses and Lasik technology. Likewise, very attractive people know they have an increased likelihood of mating. This mating, for many of them, is a recreational activity instead of a procreative activity. So the use of prophylactics among attractive people actually prevents evolution from taking its course.
So why do we seem to have teenage girls blossoming so early? I'd wager that it is the use of hormones in cows that has artificially accelerated the aging process among humans. Since it is very easy to determine accelerated physiological changes in girls (larger breasts, wider hips, etc) than in boys (facial and body hair, etc), the incorrect assumption may be made that only girls are being affected. However, the use of hormones in our food affects all who ingest it.
There are lots of data sources which are perfectly reasonable to use. NOAA's data being probably the best and most comprehensive.
Yes, the UK is turning into a strange parody of itself with its attempts to close the government to the public on the one hand and monitor citizens very closely on the other. But it's not the only game in town. Despite my own country's recent 8 year slump towards the same type of fascist state as Britain, the US scientific community is still one of the best and most open in the world.
The question is whether 4chan is the real problem or the reaction to 4chan is./b/ is what it is and has been for quite a while. And the American Southern culture also has roots that go back at least 300 years. So in a battle for legitimacy, which one should take precedence over the other?
We can talk about freedom of speech and such, but/b/ is home to content that is occasionally over the line illegal. On the other hand, only those who would actually seek it out would even know about it, so it doesn't make sense to "protect" the fair citizens of Hillbilly Valley by blocking the site.
Raymond Bradbury wrote about this in his seminal work Farenheit 451. Once we start allowing the minority to exert power over the majority in the name of fairness and protection, we lose a critical pillar of our society. Censorship is the first step, but later it will be outright censure.
Let's let that which is illegal stay illegal, and give everyone the benefit of full access, even if they don't want it. But I'm not from the South, so my cultural background doesn't lead me to the conclusion that censorship is better than freedom.
Anyone who thinks Apple is going to sit on their laurels while Android eats its lunch simply doesn't know Steve Jobs. First, compare the quality of user experience between the iPhone and all of its rivals. The iPhone is so far ahead of anything currently on the market that Apple has the luxury of rejecting apps that would otherwise be useful for their customers.
But despite this insurmountable lead in the UI, Apple is still developing their next version of the iPhone. There can be no doubt that they are going to take the best ideas of the current iPhone, the current competition, and the huge set of iPhone apps. So we can look forward to applications which run in the background like Latitude. We can expect to find better copy/paste support. All signs point to an even better keyboard experience. And more than anything, the connectivity between iPhones will be much better.
The competition will, as always, be one step behind. Following the leader is a losing game. Google is doing a great job in trying to change the rules with Android, but unlike Apple, OEMs using Android simply don't understand the user as well as Apple does.
The only assumption that I made was that the recommendation engine could be improved.
With approximately 10,000 subscribers (as of 2008), and 1.3B in revenues from these subscribers, even a 1% increase in rentals would be worth 10 times the 1M they are paying to the winner of this contest.
Amazon has almost 20B in revenues from a much larger group of customers. A 1% increase per customer here would be huge.
Netflix, in addition to increasing the number of rentals per customer, should also be thinking about increasing the total number of customers.
Sorry for the dangling preposition in the subject, but regardless of whether or not Jupiter acts as a magnet for dangerous astral bodies, I wonder how risky it is to leave that job to Jupiter.
We have seatbelts in cars despite the mandatory brakes which are installed. We have random personal screenings at the airport even though we have a standardized process of metal detection and baggage scanning. We should not just sit idly without a comet/asteroid detection and elimination system just because Jupiter is catching the big ones for us.
We've been hit before. I don't want to get caught in the slamming door. How about some information, please!
Back when I first began using Amazon.com, I never bought a book based on the recommended items. I felt the recommendations were trite, ill-advised, and typically only peripherally related to the item I was buying.
Then the recommendations got better. Much better. I started to find myself buying things right out of the recommended section, and the product combination deals also became very tempting.
If Netflix can turn their recommendation engine into something similar, they will be sitting on a goldmine. As they say, people hate get sold to but they love buying.
I have no doubt that many in the wireless telecom business would love nothing more than to implement customer-friendly features and services. This is the main thrust of much of what is going on behind the scenes. Tradeshows and conferences feature discussions about how to maximize customer satisfaction through improved customer experiences. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that there is some cabal trying to keep cellphone customers in the dark ages.
However that's not the whole story. The wireless telecoms are descendants of the old wired telecoms. And with that heritage comes all the baggage you would expect. Terrible billing rates, bad customer service, and all the rest. To upend such a situation and return to a customer-centric service/pricing model would require a tremendous amount of investment. That investment cannot be made due to the way the stock market judges the performance of companies based on 3 month periods.
Getting sued for deliberately damaging profits is less profitable than simply sticking with the status-quo. So expect to continue to be screwed over by the phone companies. They don't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company.
Since we're talking about learning languages here, I think we need to remember to balance "excitement of programming" with actual learning.
Assembler is a terrible first language because it doesn't really teach programming so much as learning how a particular CPU works. You could theoretically get away with something like MIX because it's just a simple emulation of assembly, but real assembly language programming is something that really shouldn't be attempted until normal programming is learned.
On the other hand, using a language that allows a student to create a "cool" application very quickly can't possibly teach them very much about programming and computer science. When there is too much "magic" and "gee-whiz" language support, exacerbated by a heavy-handed IDE, the student learns only how to press the right buttons to make their project work. They don't learn what is going on in enough detail to take those concepts to other more useful languages.
So a balance definitely needs to be struck. Python, as many have said, is a good language, though I would actually prefer one with static typing. BASIC is another good choice, though it's been much maligned by many. Personally, I think C is a great learning language, though it too has shortcomings.
Like anything, though, you can't satisfy everyone. But you might as well try to satisfy someone.
I think the problem with this is that it doesn't dispel the "magicness" of programming. It creates a reliance on visual tools that perform the magic behind the scenes.
Compare Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio 2005. The newer version hides so many features from the user and performs so many little things that it creates a total dependence on the IDE to do anything. From the creation of a project to the compilation settings, the IDE controls it all in VS2005. In the older version, everything was more or less a wrapper around command line tools. Once you could see through the tools, everything about VS6 was very clear and straightforward.
A programmer learning on VS6 would understand what they were doing much better than one who learned on VS2005. Though the latter may be more productive due to the crutches of the IDE, the lack of deep understanding means that he is also less flexible when the environment changes.
So a programming language like Alice seems to be the antithesis of what a learning environment should be. It may be amazing and fun to use, but the student is not brought close enough to see the innards working, and thus I don't think they can actually learn very much from it. IMO.
You have several tradeoffs and considerations when it comes to learning programming.
Do you want to get on your feet right away? Maybe BASIC, VB, or Pascal is the best choice. Do you want to really learn about the computer? Probably ASM, but C may be a useful alternative. Do you want to learn about different ways to think about programming? By all means, stick with LISP and its children.
There is no best language to learn programming. It all depends on what you want to really learn.
I find the insistence on sticking with Scheme to be a bit naive. These days we are either dealing with systems with tons of memory which makes using languages like Java much more productive than Scheme. And on the other end of the spectrum, we are dealing with small devices with limited stack space which simply couldn't handle the amount of recursion that Scheme requires. It's an interesting teaching language like Pascal used to be. But technology has left it behind as a viable implementation language for any real world software.
The forming of a post is similar to writing a symphony or growing a tomato. All are composed of flashes of creativity followed by monotonous work to bring that creativity into the physical realm. The saving grace of writing Internet posts is the brevity of the act as well as the immediate feedback of the jeering or cheering crowd.
Too muddy have I sullied myself; thought by some to be the Devil incarnate, to be moderated into oblivion so that naive eyes pass over my posts unknowingly and for the better.
Today I change! Turn over a new leaf! Here goes...
This will be a huge boon to Africa and India. These are places where the reach of technology is just now touching, and best of all it is doing it all wirelessly. So the people of these nations have cellphone access but no landline access. It's a very interesting turn of events.
The water-borne blood diseases of India and the insect-borne blood diseases of Africa are incorrigible killers. I hope that some of the damage Rachel Carson did can be reversed. Call it White-guilt or whatever, but helping our fellow man out of the dark ages and into a happier and healthier era can only be a good thing, I think.
The USPTO should really rely on Slashdot more often to flush out these illegal patents.
Counting on Ray Ozzie to come to Lotus' defense is a fool's errand, though. Like all the once-luminary personalities that got bought by Microsoft, he belongs to them and will serve their interests instead of our own.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I meet my therapist at the bar every afternoon for drinks at happy hour.
This reads like a news article from the late 19th century. So your comment is actually very pertinent since the industrialists of that age also sought profits above the wel-being of the workers and the environment.
Would you say they are putting the cart before the horse?
I think they are simply solving the chicken and egg problem.
First hit on Google.
http://3g4g.blogspot.com/2007/05/3g-39g.html
LTE is known as 3.9G everywhere else in the world.
But hey, we're just dumb Americans.
I think Marie Antoinette encapsulated the American telecom business attitude in the incorrectly attributed quote, "Let them eat crumbs"
36 - 24 - 36
Only if she's 5'3"
Evolutionarily, you'd expect that a species would gravitate towards more attractive members due to the increased ability of those members to reproduce. But consider that the likelihood of an ugly set of people to actually reproduce is much higher than a set of very attractive people to do so.
Humans are an interesting species. We are able to actually avoid evolution. In several tens of generations, humans will likely be all near-sighted due to our glasses and Lasik technology. Likewise, very attractive people know they have an increased likelihood of mating. This mating, for many of them, is a recreational activity instead of a procreative activity. So the use of prophylactics among attractive people actually prevents evolution from taking its course.
So why do we seem to have teenage girls blossoming so early? I'd wager that it is the use of hormones in cows that has artificially accelerated the aging process among humans. Since it is very easy to determine accelerated physiological changes in girls (larger breasts, wider hips, etc) than in boys (facial and body hair, etc), the incorrect assumption may be made that only girls are being affected. However, the use of hormones in our food affects all who ingest it.
There are lots of data sources which are perfectly reasonable to use. NOAA's data being probably the best and most comprehensive.
Yes, the UK is turning into a strange parody of itself with its attempts to close the government to the public on the one hand and monitor citizens very closely on the other. But it's not the only game in town. Despite my own country's recent 8 year slump towards the same type of fascist state as Britain, the US scientific community is still one of the best and most open in the world.
So come and get your data from us, ya'll.
Sex outside of marriage? You can be damned well sure she ought to be arrested.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/246259/Saudi_Arabia_Rape_victim_gets_200_lashes
The question is whether 4chan is the real problem or the reaction to 4chan is. /b/ is what it is and has been for quite a while. And the American Southern culture also has roots that go back at least 300 years. So in a battle for legitimacy, which one should take precedence over the other?
We can talk about freedom of speech and such, but /b/ is home to content that is occasionally over the line illegal. On the other hand, only those who would actually seek it out would even know about it, so it doesn't make sense to "protect" the fair citizens of Hillbilly Valley by blocking the site.
Raymond Bradbury wrote about this in his seminal work Farenheit 451. Once we start allowing the minority to exert power over the majority in the name of fairness and protection, we lose a critical pillar of our society. Censorship is the first step, but later it will be outright censure.
Let's let that which is illegal stay illegal, and give everyone the benefit of full access, even if they don't want it. But I'm not from the South, so my cultural background doesn't lead me to the conclusion that censorship is better than freedom.
Once upon a time these guys were the baddest of the badasses. But nowadays Russia, China, and North Korea have become real threats.
What can a group of guys in Boston do that could rival Russian hackers?
Anyone who thinks Apple is going to sit on their laurels while Android eats its lunch simply doesn't know Steve Jobs. First, compare the quality of user experience between the iPhone and all of its rivals. The iPhone is so far ahead of anything currently on the market that Apple has the luxury of rejecting apps that would otherwise be useful for their customers.
But despite this insurmountable lead in the UI, Apple is still developing their next version of the iPhone. There can be no doubt that they are going to take the best ideas of the current iPhone, the current competition, and the huge set of iPhone apps. So we can look forward to applications which run in the background like Latitude. We can expect to find better copy/paste support. All signs point to an even better keyboard experience. And more than anything, the connectivity between iPhones will be much better.
The competition will, as always, be one step behind. Following the leader is a losing game. Google is doing a great job in trying to change the rules with Android, but unlike Apple, OEMs using Android simply don't understand the user as well as Apple does.
The only assumption that I made was that the recommendation engine could be improved.
With approximately 10,000 subscribers (as of 2008), and 1.3B in revenues from these subscribers, even a 1% increase in rentals would be worth 10 times the 1M they are paying to the winner of this contest.
Amazon has almost 20B in revenues from a much larger group of customers. A 1% increase per customer here would be huge.
Netflix, in addition to increasing the number of rentals per customer, should also be thinking about increasing the total number of customers.
Um. What?
What the craters on the far side of the moon tell us is that the asteroid field is mostly outside the moon's orbit radius.
Sorry for the dangling preposition in the subject, but regardless of whether or not Jupiter acts as a magnet for dangerous astral bodies, I wonder how risky it is to leave that job to Jupiter.
We have seatbelts in cars despite the mandatory brakes which are installed. We have random personal screenings at the airport even though we have a standardized process of metal detection and baggage scanning. We should not just sit idly without a comet/asteroid detection and elimination system just because Jupiter is catching the big ones for us.
We've been hit before. I don't want to get caught in the slamming door. How about some information, please!
*ahem*
http://slashdot.org/faq/code.shtml
Back when I first began using Amazon.com, I never bought a book based on the recommended items. I felt the recommendations were trite, ill-advised, and typically only peripherally related to the item I was buying.
Then the recommendations got better. Much better. I started to find myself buying things right out of the recommended section, and the product combination deals also became very tempting.
If Netflix can turn their recommendation engine into something similar, they will be sitting on a goldmine. As they say, people hate get sold to but they love buying.
The Hubble telescope still brings home the bacon. It's a great device that continues to do its good work.
The scar looks like a belly button. Right below another scar from when they took Jupiter's appendix out.
I have no doubt that many in the wireless telecom business would love nothing more than to implement customer-friendly features and services. This is the main thrust of much of what is going on behind the scenes. Tradeshows and conferences feature discussions about how to maximize customer satisfaction through improved customer experiences. It is a mistake, I think, to assume that there is some cabal trying to keep cellphone customers in the dark ages.
However that's not the whole story. The wireless telecoms are descendants of the old wired telecoms. And with that heritage comes all the baggage you would expect. Terrible billing rates, bad customer service, and all the rest. To upend such a situation and return to a customer-centric service/pricing model would require a tremendous amount of investment. That investment cannot be made due to the way the stock market judges the performance of companies based on 3 month periods.
Getting sued for deliberately damaging profits is less profitable than simply sticking with the status-quo. So expect to continue to be screwed over by the phone companies. They don't care. They don't have to. They're the phone company.
Since we're talking about learning languages here, I think we need to remember to balance "excitement of programming" with actual learning.
Assembler is a terrible first language because it doesn't really teach programming so much as learning how a particular CPU works. You could theoretically get away with something like MIX because it's just a simple emulation of assembly, but real assembly language programming is something that really shouldn't be attempted until normal programming is learned.
On the other hand, using a language that allows a student to create a "cool" application very quickly can't possibly teach them very much about programming and computer science. When there is too much "magic" and "gee-whiz" language support, exacerbated by a heavy-handed IDE, the student learns only how to press the right buttons to make their project work. They don't learn what is going on in enough detail to take those concepts to other more useful languages.
So a balance definitely needs to be struck. Python, as many have said, is a good language, though I would actually prefer one with static typing. BASIC is another good choice, though it's been much maligned by many. Personally, I think C is a great learning language, though it too has shortcomings.
Like anything, though, you can't satisfy everyone. But you might as well try to satisfy someone.
I think the problem with this is that it doesn't dispel the "magicness" of programming. It creates a reliance on visual tools that perform the magic behind the scenes.
Compare Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio 2005. The newer version hides so many features from the user and performs so many little things that it creates a total dependence on the IDE to do anything. From the creation of a project to the compilation settings, the IDE controls it all in VS2005. In the older version, everything was more or less a wrapper around command line tools. Once you could see through the tools, everything about VS6 was very clear and straightforward.
A programmer learning on VS6 would understand what they were doing much better than one who learned on VS2005. Though the latter may be more productive due to the crutches of the IDE, the lack of deep understanding means that he is also less flexible when the environment changes.
So a programming language like Alice seems to be the antithesis of what a learning environment should be. It may be amazing and fun to use, but the student is not brought close enough to see the innards working, and thus I don't think they can actually learn very much from it. IMO.
You have several tradeoffs and considerations when it comes to learning programming.
Do you want to get on your feet right away? Maybe BASIC, VB, or Pascal is the best choice.
Do you want to really learn about the computer? Probably ASM, but C may be a useful alternative.
Do you want to learn about different ways to think about programming? By all means, stick with LISP and its children.
There is no best language to learn programming. It all depends on what you want to really learn.
I find the insistence on sticking with Scheme to be a bit naive. These days we are either dealing with systems with tons of memory which makes using languages like Java much more productive than Scheme. And on the other end of the spectrum, we are dealing with small devices with limited stack space which simply couldn't handle the amount of recursion that Scheme requires. It's an interesting teaching language like Pascal used to be. But technology has left it behind as a viable implementation language for any real world software.
I repent my errant ways.
The forming of a post is similar to writing a symphony or growing a tomato. All are composed of flashes of creativity followed by monotonous work to bring that creativity into the physical realm. The saving grace of writing Internet posts is the brevity of the act as well as the immediate feedback of the jeering or cheering crowd.
Too muddy have I sullied myself; thought by some to be the Devil incarnate, to be moderated into oblivion so that naive eyes pass over my posts unknowingly and for the better.
Today I change! Turn over a new leaf! Here goes...
This will be a huge boon to Africa and India. These are places where the reach of technology is just now touching, and best of all it is doing it all wirelessly. So the people of these nations have cellphone access but no landline access. It's a very interesting turn of events.
The water-borne blood diseases of India and the insect-borne blood diseases of Africa are incorrigible killers. I hope that some of the damage Rachel Carson did can be reversed. Call it White-guilt or whatever, but helping our fellow man out of the dark ages and into a happier and healthier era can only be a good thing, I think.
Is the company required to consult him for every patent proposed?
The USPTO should really rely on Slashdot more often to flush out these illegal patents.
Counting on Ray Ozzie to come to Lotus' defense is a fool's errand, though. Like all the once-luminary personalities that got bought by Microsoft, he belongs to them and will serve their interests instead of our own. :-)