The Australian Government should surely be looking at, for instance, how much of the decoration and formatting, how much of the Powerpoint, are actually wasted effort.
Almost all of it. The entire purpose of typesetting systems such as (La)TeX is to make it so the users didn't have to worry about such things.
As has been mentioned before, splash screens do serve a useful purpose in letting users know the app is actually loading. As has been mentioned before, Photoshop does a lot of stuff, so it's more or less impossible to get the program down to a reasonable size in a single executable. As such, you're pretty much left with a single option. Go back to the philosophy of making each program doing one thing well; in this case, a separate program for each photo effect. Now your huge, monolithic program becomes not much more than a simple shell that calls a number of smaller programs only when their needed.
Imagine if, to boot Linux, everything in $PATH had to be loaded into memory. That's pretty much what Photoshop does; no wonder it takes forever.
Are you trying to claim there is no legitimate anime on YouTube?
I am not aware of any.
Aka, for the neckbearded virgins.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
"No *atmospheric* warning in the last decade or two! IT'S A HOAX!"
Except they don't claim it's a hoax. There was nothing in the article claiming that global warming doesn't exist. In fact, they don't even debate the existence of global warming. They even mentioned Climategate without calling them frauds.
The specific claims:
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.
Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse.
There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy.
A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls.
And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.
If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data.
If ten thousand plaintiffs sue a large company and win $1,000 each, that's $10 million that the company has to explain to its shareholders.
If.
I have ADHD. I am most certainly offended by being equated with that
AD(H)D (like most psychological disorders) is exactly what it says on the tin: Attention Deficit Disorder (with Hyperactivity). Having a small attention span does not make you an asshole.
Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity; it's simply stubbornness. Integrity includes being able to admit you were wrong before, which is seems to be looked down on in our society; consider how many politicians have been accused of "flip-flopping" on a controversial subject.
The problem with this simplification is that it is rarely obvious that one's belief is incorrect.
If the facts are not clear, then everyone is entitled to their own opinion. In science it's called a hypothesis; In mathematics, a conjecture; in religion, faith. I don't see much of a problem with using opinion in place of unknown facts, as long as they are clearly (and correctly) labeled as such.
Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity; it's simply stubbornness.
No. It's not that simple. Saying it is stubbornness implies that the believer understands they are wrong, or understands that looking at the data will enlighten them into a new outlook. It's more like this (and I'm still simplifying there.)
I chose my words poorly. What I meant was exactly what you describe; when one continues to believe something which has been proven false. Sorry for the confusion.
No, the problem with purely functional languages is that they are incomplete and do not cover all useful paradigms sufficiently. If a language makes you write anything out longhand, it failed to properly provide an expressive form for the paradigm.
Hasn't stopped Java. They like to call them "design patterns" rather than "failures of notation," though.
There are a few problems with functional programming languages that have prevented their true adoption anywhere.
1. Limited paradigms - I always prefer languages that let me write my code the way I want, a la C++, than a language that requires a strict paradigm from academia like Lisp. If I want to use the inherent hardware property based side effects of certain code structures, let me. Programming languages =/= mothers.
The problem with a language that "lets you write the code the way you want" is that most people don't want to read code that's been written the way you want to write it. That may also include you six months from now; you end up with code that's hard to read and hard to maintain.
2. Difficulty. 90% of programmers (not on the internet, in general) write code like Fortran when its 2010. The most popular languages now, C# and Java, are popular because they are extremely easy to understand, if not easy to get things done in. You dont need to know lambda calculus or templates or prototyping to understand 99% of C# / java code (yes, I know C# has all of those and java has 2/3 of those). The problem with functional languages is that they always use these paradigms.
I'm not sure I'd consider Java "extremely easy to understand." I find Java code very hard to read, if only because the syntax is so cluttered. I'm not a functional programmer at all, (I mostly program in Go) but I think lambda calculus is an interesting concept, if only because it's very different from how I usually write programs. Object-oriented programming (at least, as it's done in Java) is also quite different from what I'm used to doing, and I think it's an interesting approach to writing programs as well. Neither way is really "better," just different.
I mean, I dont use them. Thats personal preference. I like the way C and OO work more than I like dynamic typing and having no data and all the other out of this world paradigms. I really hope that D can achieve what I hope it will evolve into, a language that is hopefully as easy to understand as Python without the boilerplate of Java but with the performance of C. Thats kind of where the end goal of programming languages needs to be.
Have you checked out Go? It fits your description pretty well, though your mileage may vary as to how well.
I agree with the linked article in that we need more languages, but those languages need to try to do less. For instance, you mentioned that 99% of C#/Java code doesn't use lambda calculus or templates or prototyping; then what's the point of them being in the language if nobody uses them? This also gets back to the point I made above about C++; when you try to do everything really well, you end up doing everything poorly. Go is my favorite language not only because of the features it has, but also because of the features that were deliberately left out. Sometimes, trying to program in a language that doesn't have everything is easier than trying to program in a language that does.
One of the reasons context-free searches isn't more prevalent in everyday computing is the increase in complexity and thus computation resources needed to process it. If regular grammar was linear, then context-free is closer to linearithmic (n*log(n)).
Regular grammar searches are linear, or they are in a proper implementation. In addition, LALR parsers also run in linear time. There is an increased space requirement; regular grammars are equivalent of finite-state automata, and therefore require constant state, whereas a context-free grammar is equivalent to a pushdown automata, or a FSA with an extra stack. I couldn't find any sources on the space requirements of an LALR or an LR parser, but I should probably note that a linearly-bounded automaton requires O(n) space and is more powerful than a pushdown automaton, so the space requirements are likely less than linear for an LALR parser.
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
