Reading sites like this one, it seems pretty clear that while LISA was a flop in and of itself, the original mac would never have been a success without it. This is both in terms of personnel (several key people were involved with both) and ideas - there was a lot of cross-pollination (though it doesn't sound like the LISA people were happy about that). So as a product, LISA was a flop, but as an investment by Apple, I'd think it should be considered wildly successful.
In fact there is even a mathematical proof that seems to indicate that human languages should be technically unlearn-able (google: EM Gold language grammar - "Language identification in the limit"). IIRC - the synopsis being that, human languages are at least as sophisticated as context free languages (and can to some degree be modeled by context free languages) and the grammar of context free languages should not be learnable from the sort of linguistic input available to a child.
Gold's proof shows that language is unlearnable given a variety of assumptions, many of which are probably incorrect. The crucial one is that any context free language is potentially a natural language that a child would have to learn. Equivalently, this proof assumes that the child knows no more about the target language than that it is a context free language. Given the range of possible context free languages, it is clear that very very few of them are possible natural languages (for instance take the two-vocabulary-item grammar of As and Bs where there are the same number of As as Bs - not conceivable as a natural language.) Children also almost certainly know more about the potential language than this.
Also, Gold's paper is from 1959 or so, and there is a whole literature since then following up on his proof, and looking at the assumptions in more detail. State of the art on mathematical language acquisition it is not.
I agree that mieville is overrated, but..."take away his word processor"?? Something about that statement just doesn't sit well at all with me.
First, I don't think you've read enough truly bad sci-fi/fantasy, most of which mieville is leagues better than, no matter what his shortcomings are.
Second, don't you think it's possible for an author to improve? Perdido street station was his second book. If you took away the word processor(/pen) of everyone who couldn't write well, no one would ever get to write well. Mieville's world-building skills combined with very skilled writing would make for very good books, don't you think? He's not exactly old or even what you might consider a mature writer.
My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?
The real question is whether it is as good as any of the wiki implementations that are open source? These days there seem to be as many of them as there are open-source IRC clients.
they pulled horrible stunts like not actually allowing you to download unlimited music (per their contract) but putting some aritifical cap on your downloading. They also used to incriminate people for downloading too much even though there was a unlimited deal in the contract. I started to lose respect for them.
As I recall, these people were downloading amounts of music that were on the order of being greater than the amount you could physically listen to per given time span. Just saying...
The overwhelming majority of Libertarians are actually the only ones that understand that the dilution of the money supply is a form of fraud (and really has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright violation).
Actually, in my experience, libertarians fall in to two groups: (i) they think pot should be legal, and (ii) they are rich enough that they don't feel like paying taxes. All other justifications that either group comes up with are after the fact; just window dressing. Not that those reasons are necessarily bad, but I haven't found libertarians to be a very insightful bunch w.r.t. public policy, economic policy, etc.
The court denied Novell's motion to dismiss the case, and then granted TSG leave to re-file their case with specific information on special damages.
Actually, Novell filed two motions to dismiss, and the court denied one and granted without prejudice the other. The granted motion was about special damages, which SCO apparently failed to prove. I don't know whether the extra thirty days are required by the law or not, but there may be a reason why they didn't do file this information in the first place (i.e. there were no special damages). It looks like if SCO doesn't file this in thirty days, the dismissal holds.
these appear to be sales for which it is likely he had a prior plan/contract to sell (at least this is what a google search of rule 10b5-1 reveals). As such he probably had them scheduled well in advance to sell, though I suppose only his accountants know the details of the plan. I'd be surprised if this is anything that could be called insider trading.
I'm not sure having a low user id indicates anything - except that they probably created the account around 5 years ago. the proportion of trolls probably hasn't changed much around here since then.
There is a good analysis of Searle's argument by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in the Mind's I, where they include Searle's original chinese room article plus their own commentary. I think it might help to sort out the questions that are under discussion in this thread. It is an opposing point of view to Searle.
Have you actually read more than one of his uplift books? They are almost explicitly about how this "feudal/fascist" system is bad, and the second trilogy ends (among other things) essentially with the uplift system being shattered. I think one of his points is that lotr results in a return to the normal status quo, rather than any change.
Only the one ring was forged by Sauron. The rest were simply made under his influence (by elves), and three which someone mentioned above were never touched by him at all.
Also, you're pretty angry over what's basically an opinion piece by someone you've apparently never heard of (a quite good sci-fi author and probably better equipped for analysis than you). In fact, a lot of people seem to have gotten pretty angry over this article. Maybe you (and the other angry people) should relax a little bit instead of taking lotr so seriously. People are reacting like Brin has insulted their religion.
The elves seemed fixated on stasis, and even the things that they built (Rivendell, Lothlorien) were in part the products of the power of Sauron and were held together by the rings he created for the elves and which he vested with their power.
Sorry -- I blew it with the above statement. The elven rings were not made by Sauron, but were made by elves -- what follows is a pretty good summary of the history of the various rings.
Who made the Rings of Power?
It was the Elves of Eregion who made all the rings, except for the One which Sauron forged by himself in Mount Doom.
I think you were actually right the first time. The following is a direct quote from the silmarillion (from "Of the rings of power and the third age":
It was in Eregion that the counsels of Sauron were most gladly received, for in that land the Noldor desire ever to increase the skill of their works. Moreover they were not at peace in their hearts, since they had refused to return into the West, and they desired both to stay in Middle-earth, which indeed they loved, and yet to enjoy the bliss of those that had departed. Therefore they hearkened to Sauron, and learned of him many things, for his knowledge was great. In those days the smiths of Ost-in-Edhil surpassed all that they had contrived before; and they took thought, and they made the rings of power. But Sauron guided their labours, and he was aware of all that they did; for his desire was to set a bond upon the Elves and to bring them under his vigilance.
It goes on to talk about Sauron forging the ruling ring, and how when the Elves discovered it they took off their rings and hid them. It even says the following: "Therefore the Three [most powerful elven rings] remained unsullied, for they were forged by Celebrimbor alone, and the hand of Sauron had never touched them"
Sauron may not have made the rings directly, but they were certainly his product.
This is highly not recommended - because the encoding techniques are quite different this is likely to result in bad artifacts. If you really want high quality oggs you will unfortunately have to reencode from CD. Unfortunately this probably goes for any transcoding between lossy audio formats.
> Not really. I got a degree in Computer Engineering from the #2 private engineering school in the country and I was never taught regex. If you know how to program and not just crank out syntax, you can pick up regex on your own pretty fast.
To be a little pedantic the original poster probably meant being taught regular expressions in a formal language theory framework, where one talks about properties of computability. The same course would teach things like finite state machines (which in terms of computability are equivalent to classical regular expressions though I think not to perl regexps), context free grammars (pushdown automata) and turing machines, and just general computability (and maybe complexity) theory. All of these things have a great deal to do with how programs work, and the lack of such theory is probably actually one of the drawbacks of doing something like computer engineering over computer science. (at least from my perspective)
> now everyone has immediate access to a moblie, and plantable, tracking device.
These are $550 PDAs, not $1 tiny spy bugs! I think most people aren't going to carelessly toss them in their friend's bags just for fun. Especially not now that everyone's seen this article.
Well, this is not the sort of response I had expected. My post was quite honest in that I really thought the parent poster might actually like Ruby, given what they said, and I was suggesting it because odds are, they didn't know about it.
Perhaps, in the event that you read this response, you should read this article and perhaps be enlightened (or not).
I use ruby because I like it, simple as that. I've used a bunch of other languages, not common lisp, but scheme, ML, and a little bit of smalltalk (among others). And it just happened that ruby has won out at this point, possibly to be replaced by liking some other language (though probably not common lisp or smalltalk) some day.
Anyone seriously thinking about the concept of reinventing the wheel should note the dramatic differences between the wheel that goes on the bottom of a 747, and the wheel used on a wagon 4000 years ago. Though it does seem like what you are asking is more like 'why doesn't everyone use common lisp, because it is the best language ever!' than actually 'why do people reinvent the wheel?'
And posting on slashdot is much more of a waste of time than writing a language.
There is one person (a south african, not foreign) running the domain right now, not any sort of committee. He has stated that he does not want to continue running it, sice he's been doing it for years without getting paid for it. He is running it basically because he was around when the opportunity to have a.za domain name came up, way back at the beginning. However, he doesn't want to give control to the government without them following ICANN procedures. The law would simply make his administration of the domain illegal.
I also did not take the comment about guns as a statement about south africa. Every government in the world has guns, and very few seem overly afraid to use them. In fact, there's not a country in the world that the statement "the government, of course, has men with guns" would not apply to. I think this statement certainly wouldn't be out of context if used on, e.g. America.
You might like Ruby. A lot of the ideas behind it follow from the smalltalk message passing paradigm, the iterators are quite similar, and a lot of former smalltalk fans seem to use it. It is not really meant as an improvement on smalltalk though; the syntax is completely different, and it borrows ideas from other languages too.
Actually, what it really means (though this is not explicit in the release notes) is that you can't share a profile between mozilla 1.0 and existing versions of netscape. I read elsewhere (maybe in the FAQ?) that this will be doable in future netscape builds (i.e. ones based on moz1.0). Also, from the bug report, which you rather unfairly neglected to quote:
The 1.0 relnote for this bug is good but not enough. The solution should be that Netscape creates its own registry.dat and doesn't touch Mozilla's. That should be done for the next major Netscape release, or there will be a lot of users with profile corruption caused by sharing profiles between Netscape and Mozilla. That could lead to user frustration.
It sounds like it is actually a problem with current netscape builds.
> As many people have pointed out, at best it can be regarded as a roll-your-own appendage to cover the flaws of current mainstream languages.
I just went and looked at both of those sites and I don't think that either are portraying design patterns nearly as harshly as you say they are.
Here is a quote from the second link: "Some of the patterns disappear -- that is, they are supported directly by language features, some patterns are simpler or have a different focus, and some are essentially unchanged."
From the first, "16 out of 23 patterns have qualitatively simpler implementations in lisp or Dylan than C++ for at least some uses of these patterns".
Both of these are quite balanced evenhanded statements, neither condemning design patterns or equating them with language flaws. Both links are oriented towards only one difference between language kinds, dynamic rather than static. There are quite satisfactory reasons to choose static languages over dynamic ones regardless of whether the design patterns are more complex, and it is somewhat closeminded to call either approach flawed.
This is perhaps not so surprising when you consider that both crystal decisions and its parent company seagate have relatively close ties to microsoft. Crystal reports is part of Visual Studio.NET and has been distributed with VB for a while. Seagate makes the hard drives for the X-Box. In fact, it surprises me that they even support apache on non-windows platforms - and in fact this probably says something decent about them.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading sites like this one, it seems pretty clear that while LISA was a flop in and of itself, the original mac would never have been a success without it. This is both in terms of personnel (several key people were involved with both) and ideas - there was a lot of cross-pollination (though it doesn't sound like the LISA people were happy about that). So as a product, LISA was a flop, but as an investment by Apple, I'd think it should be considered wildly successful.
In fact there is even a mathematical proof that seems to indicate that human languages should be technically unlearn-able (google: EM Gold language grammar - "Language identification in the limit"). IIRC - the synopsis being that, human languages are at least as sophisticated as context free languages (and can to some degree be modeled by context free languages) and the grammar of context free languages should not be learnable from the sort of linguistic input available to a child.
Gold's proof shows that language is unlearnable given a variety of assumptions, many of which are probably incorrect. The crucial one is that any context free language is potentially a natural language that a child would have to learn. Equivalently, this proof assumes that the child knows no more about the target language than that it is a context free language. Given the range of possible context free languages, it is clear that very very few of them are possible natural languages (for instance take the two-vocabulary-item grammar of As and Bs where there are the same number of As as Bs - not conceivable as a natural language.) Children also almost certainly know more about the potential language than this.
Also, Gold's paper is from 1959 or so, and there is a whole literature since then following up on his proof, and looking at the assumptions in more detail. State of the art on mathematical language acquisition it is not.
(and it's "Noam Chomsky")
huh?
I agree that mieville is overrated, but..."take away his word processor"?? Something about that statement just doesn't sit well at all with me.
First, I don't think you've read enough truly bad sci-fi/fantasy, most of which mieville is leagues better than, no matter what his shortcomings are.
Second, don't you think it's possible for an author to improve? Perdido street station was his second book. If you took away the word processor(/pen) of everyone who couldn't write well, no one would ever get to write well. Mieville's world-building skills combined with very skilled writing would make for very good books, don't you think? He's not exactly old or even what you might consider a mature writer.
My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?
The real question is whether it is as good as any of the wiki implementations that are open source? These days there seem to be as many of them as there are open-source IRC clients.
they pulled horrible stunts like not actually allowing you to download unlimited music (per their contract) but putting some aritifical cap on your downloading. They also used to incriminate people for downloading too much even though there was a unlimited deal in the contract. I started to lose respect for them.
As I recall, these people were downloading amounts of music that were on the order of being greater than the amount you could physically listen to per given time span. Just saying...
The overwhelming majority of Libertarians are actually the only ones that understand that the dilution of the money supply is a form of fraud (and really has nothing whatsoever to do with copyright violation).
Actually, in my experience, libertarians fall in to two groups: (i) they think pot should be legal, and (ii) they are rich enough that they don't feel like paying taxes. All other justifications that either group comes up with are after the fact; just window dressing. Not that those reasons are necessarily bad, but I haven't found libertarians to be a very insightful bunch w.r.t. public policy, economic policy, etc.
The court denied Novell's motion to dismiss the case, and then granted TSG leave to re-file their case with specific information on special damages.
Actually, Novell filed two motions to dismiss, and the court denied one and granted without prejudice the other. The granted motion was about special damages, which SCO apparently failed to prove. I don't know whether the extra thirty days are required by the law or not, but there may be a reason why they didn't do file this information in the first place (i.e. there were no special damages). It looks like if SCO doesn't file this in thirty days, the dismissal holds.
2 posts explaining in detail how this is not an anti-competitive move by Apple
er, but apple hasn't done anything...the post is about adobe dropping mac support for a product...
these appear to be sales for which it is likely he had a prior plan/contract to sell (at least this is what a google search of rule 10b5-1 reveals). As such he probably had them scheduled well in advance to sell, though I suppose only his accountants know the details of the plan. I'd be surprised if this is anything that could be called insider trading.
I'm not sure having a low user id indicates anything - except that they probably created the account around 5 years ago. the proportion of trolls probably hasn't changed much around here since then.
(and I had no idea what XD2 was either)
There is a good analysis of Searle's argument by Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in the Mind's I, where they include Searle's original chinese room article plus their own commentary. I think it might help to sort out the questions that are under discussion in this thread. It is an opposing point of view to Searle.
Have you actually read more than one of his uplift books? They are almost explicitly about how this "feudal/fascist" system is bad, and the second trilogy ends (among other things) essentially with the uplift system being shattered. I think one of his points is that lotr results in a return to the normal status quo, rather than any change.
Only the one ring was forged by Sauron. The rest were simply made under his influence (by elves), and three which someone mentioned above were never touched by him at all.
Also, you're pretty angry over what's basically an opinion piece by someone you've apparently never heard of (a quite good sci-fi author and probably better equipped for analysis than you). In fact, a lot of people seem to have gotten pretty angry over this article. Maybe you (and the other angry people) should relax a little bit instead of taking lotr so seriously. People are reacting like Brin has insulted their religion.
The elves seemed fixated on stasis, and even the things that they built (Rivendell, Lothlorien) were in part the products of the power of Sauron and were held together by the rings he created for the elves and which he vested with their power.
Sorry -- I blew it with the above statement. The elven rings were not made by Sauron, but were made by elves -- what follows is a pretty good summary of the history of the various rings.
Who made the Rings of Power? It was the Elves of Eregion who made all the rings, except for the One which Sauron forged by himself in Mount Doom.
I think you were actually right the first time. The following is a direct quote from the silmarillion (from "Of the rings of power and the third age":
It was in Eregion that the counsels of Sauron were most gladly received, for in that land the Noldor desire ever to increase the skill of their works. Moreover they were not at peace in their hearts, since they had refused to return into the West, and they desired both to stay in Middle-earth, which indeed they loved, and yet to enjoy the bliss of those that had departed. Therefore they hearkened to Sauron, and learned of him many things, for his knowledge was great. In those days the smiths of Ost-in-Edhil surpassed all that they had contrived before; and they took thought, and they made the rings of power. But Sauron guided their labours, and he was aware of all that they did; for his desire was to set a bond upon the Elves and to bring them under his vigilance.
It goes on to talk about Sauron forging the ruling ring, and how when the Elves discovered it they took off their rings and hid them. It even says the following: "Therefore the Three [most powerful elven rings] remained unsullied, for they were forged by Celebrimbor alone, and the hand of Sauron had never touched them"
Sauron may not have made the rings directly, but they were certainly his product.
This is highly not recommended - because the encoding techniques are quite different this is likely to result in bad artifacts. If you really want high quality oggs you will unfortunately have to reencode from CD. Unfortunately this probably goes for any transcoding between lossy audio formats.
vorbis faq entry on the topic
> Not really. I got a degree in Computer Engineering from the #2 private engineering school in the country and I was never taught regex. If you know how to program and not just crank out syntax, you can pick up regex on your own pretty fast.
To be a little pedantic the original poster probably meant being taught regular expressions in a formal language theory framework, where one talks about properties of computability. The same course would teach things like finite state machines (which in terms of computability are equivalent to classical regular expressions though I think not to perl regexps), context free grammars (pushdown automata) and turing machines, and just general computability (and maybe complexity) theory. All of these things have a great deal to do with how programs work, and the lack of such theory is probably actually one of the drawbacks of doing something like computer engineering over computer science. (at least from my perspective)
> Make packages a seperate directory. Just like good old DOS days--where every program lived by itself in a directory.
For a similar solution see rox filer and its app directories (and choices system):
http://rox.sourceforge.net/appdirs.php3
> now everyone has immediate access to a moblie, and plantable, tracking device.
These are $550 PDAs, not $1 tiny spy bugs! I think most people aren't going to carelessly toss them in their friend's bags just for fun. Especially not now that everyone's seen this article.
Well, this is not the sort of response I had expected. My post was quite honest in that I really thought the parent poster might actually like Ruby, given what they said, and I was suggesting it because odds are, they didn't know about it.
Perhaps, in the event that you read this response, you should read this article
and perhaps be enlightened (or not).
I use ruby because I like it, simple as that. I've used a bunch of other languages, not common lisp, but scheme, ML, and a little bit of smalltalk (among others). And it just happened that ruby has won out at this point, possibly to be replaced by liking some other language (though probably not common lisp or smalltalk) some day.
Anyone seriously thinking about the concept of reinventing the wheel should note the dramatic differences between the wheel that goes on the bottom of a 747, and the wheel used on a wagon 4000 years ago. Though it does seem like what you are asking is more like 'why doesn't everyone use common lisp, because it is the best language ever!' than actually 'why do people reinvent the wheel?'
And posting on slashdot is much more of a waste of time than writing a language.
I think you didn't read the article.
.za domain name came up, way back at the beginning. However, he doesn't want to give control to the government without them following ICANN procedures. The law would simply make his administration of the domain illegal.
There is one person (a south african, not foreign) running the domain right now, not any sort of committee. He has stated that he does not want to continue running it, sice he's been doing it for years without getting paid for it. He is running it basically because he was around when the opportunity to have a
I also did not take the comment about guns as a statement about south africa. Every government in the world has guns, and very few seem overly afraid to use them. In fact, there's not a country in the world that the statement "the government, of course, has men with guns" would not apply to. I think this statement certainly wouldn't be out of context if used on, e.g. America.
You might like Ruby. A lot of the ideas behind it follow from the smalltalk message passing paradigm, the iterators are quite similar, and a lot of former smalltalk fans seem to use it. It is not really meant as an improvement on smalltalk though; the syntax is completely different, and it borrows ideas from other languages too.
Actually, what it really means (though this is not explicit in the release notes) is that you can't share a profile between mozilla 1.0 and existing versions of netscape. I read elsewhere (maybe in the FAQ?) that this will be doable in future netscape builds (i.e. ones based on moz1.0). Also, from the bug report, which you rather unfairly neglected to quote:
The 1.0 relnote for this bug is good but not enough. The solution should be that
Netscape creates its own registry.dat and doesn't touch Mozilla's. That should
be done for the next major Netscape release, or there will be a lot of users
with profile corruption caused by sharing profiles between Netscape and Mozilla.
That could lead to user frustration.
It sounds like it is actually a problem with current netscape builds.
> As many people have pointed out, at best it can be regarded as a roll-your-own appendage to cover the flaws of current mainstream languages.
I just went and looked at both of those sites and I don't think that either are portraying design patterns nearly as harshly as you say they are.
Here is a quote from the second link: "Some of the patterns disappear -- that is, they are supported directly by language features, some patterns are simpler or have a different focus, and some are essentially unchanged."
From the first, "16 out of 23 patterns have qualitatively simpler implementations in lisp or Dylan than C++ for at least some uses of these patterns".
Both of these are quite balanced evenhanded statements, neither condemning design patterns or equating them with language flaws. Both links are oriented towards only one difference between language kinds, dynamic rather than static. There are quite satisfactory reasons to choose static languages over dynamic ones regardless of whether the design patterns are more complex, and it is somewhat closeminded to call either approach flawed.
This is perhaps not so surprising when you consider that both crystal decisions and its parent company seagate have relatively close ties to microsoft. Crystal reports is part of Visual Studio.NET and has been distributed with VB for a while. Seagate makes the hard drives for the X-Box. In fact, it surprises me that they even support apache on non-windows platforms - and in fact this probably says something decent about them.