Comment Re:The main innovation of course being ... (Score 0) 168
Those are cut-and-paste Fosstard arguments. Sorry, sometimes proprietary software is good.
Typed in Foss Firefox on Foss Kubuntu.
Those are cut-and-paste Fosstard arguments. Sorry, sometimes proprietary software is good.
Typed in Foss Firefox on Foss Kubuntu.
Libraries only provide new functions and types. Go look at mathlab or (shudder) labview for some examples of domain-specific datatypes (not simply classes built on the common primitives) and paradigms.
Surely you are not suggesting that the field of particle physics should be using the same tools as the field of psychiatry? That materials engineers should be using the same tools as palaeontologists?
Python is actually a good example of why adding new languages is not the answer. One of the big reasons that python has been so embraced in scientific computing are the libraries that were built on top of it that are well suited to those types of tasks.
That is very true, however they still require one to express his problem in terms of lists, sets, dicts, strings, ints, floats, and complex numbers. Not all scientific concepts can be massaged into one of those datatypes.
The python community did a reasonably good job of grafting domain specific functionality in via libraries that were fairly accessible to people who are not primarily programmers while still having the general purpose language behind it for people who are, allowing programmers and non-programmers to collaborate easily. Which is why I tend to get annoyed with the whole 'lets build a new language for this domain!' thing since all it really does is increase the barrier between fields and produces yet another custom language that needs to be learned and maintained.
The counter argument is that each individual domain needs its own programming language in the same sense that each individual domain needs its own jargon. Each domain has its own unique intricacies, problems, methods, and context. The tools used should reflect that.
That is a rather creative idea. I would love to see more practical examples of what you do with it, such as the Sigma example.
Guido is also an extremely competent C programmer (see recent Slashdot article) and he did not design Python for scientists, but rather for programmers.
that you will have to pay a lot of money to use it?
If the work that needs to be done could be done quicker or simpler (i.e. cheaper) by paying a $1000 license rather than having a $300,000-per-year researcher to go learn Python or R, then it is worth it to pay, no? The current options aren't going away.
But this one is ostensibly designed by Stephen Wolfram, who knows what scientists and physicists need from a programing language.
Python, C, Java, et al were all designed by computer programmers for computer programmers. R and Mathlab were designed by computer programmers for mathematicians, thus works a lot better for expressing certain mathematical concepts and working with them (transformations, statistics). But there is much room for improvement, especially when looking at the problem from the scientist's point of view, not from the programmer's point of view.
I have never heard of the joule-theif until now, I will definitely research this. Thanks for the tip.
Yes, possibly. I suppose that it could flip some bits in a non-volatile storage medium. Nice thinking.
How would you like to store it? In a capacitor you would need a voltage difference greater than the extant difference already in the capacitor.
Surely a well designed chip can use the power of the radiowaves already in the air, negating the need for a battery...
That is exactly how RFID works. However, RFID fields are much stronger and the receiver is much closer.
The phone could probably use the power of the radiowaves in the air to do very low power things like perhaps change an e-ink display slightly. There is no way that there is enough energy to actually transmit a signal hundreds of meters.
I also bought the Nook Simple Touch Glow with the explicit intention of rooting it. I consider it one of the best purchases that I've made in my life, I use it daily for studing with Anki or browsing with Opera. However, being stuck on Android 2.1 is exceptionally limiting. I'm looking for any E-ink device that is capable of being rooted and running Android 2.3 or 4.x. Backlight prefered, of course!
Just went through this nonsense. Switch to Insightly. It's easy and it works better than the open source alternatives, plus you don't have to host it.
You are recommending an American hosted solution for someone to trust his business secrets to? You haven't been paying attention lately.
It doesn't really matter since there are only two videocard vendors now,...
There are only two operating systems in widespread use now, so I should go write my new software in
The more we entrench the already-entrenched mono/duopolies, the harder it will be to get out of that mess.
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
What did you think that the telemetry was there for? Now you know. Stop disabling it if you want the features that you use to continue to be included.
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
